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There is an old conspiracy theory that smartphones quietly listen to everything we do, to better track ads and to make more money for businesses. Now, a new research report has attempted to demystify this theory. After a year of testing, the people of Northeastern University claim that the smartphone manufacturers and the applications installed on your phone do not listen to your conversations secretly, nor send data to unknown remote servers without your knowledge. . But do not be too happy. The researchers suggest that phones can use your camera instead, to send screen recording videos to third parties. Of course, to be certain, the study does not prove that no application is listening to you – just, that they have found none in the study. There could be applications that record audio without permission, and may be activated in conditions different from those simulated by the study.
Elleen Pan, Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson and David Choffnes of Northeastern University conducted an experiment for one year. involving 17,260 Android apps trying to see if any of them use the phone 's microphone to secretly record audio. The most striking example of this conspiracy theory is that of Facebook ads that appear mysteriously based on things you've been talking about recently. The study involved all the applications that Facebook has, and 8,000 other apps that send information to Facebook. The researchers created a robot interacting with these applications and analyzed the data and generated traffic. This is another limitation of the study because the robot was not able to perform all human activities, such as creating usernames and passwords .
In considering these limitations, these researchers have not found solid evidence. shaded and activated the microphone for audio recording without the knowledge of the user. Of the total, 9,000 apps had permission to access the camera and microphone, and they could all easily listen to private conversations to find out about your needs and then display relevant ads, but no examples were given. been found.
. Several applications have been seen taking screenshots and recording screen videos secretly of what people were doing in the application, and sending it to third parties without the permission of the user. GoPuff is one of these examples. It is an application that provides food at undue hours. We saw that the application recorded a video of what the person was doing in GoPuff and sent to a domain affiliated with AppSee. For those who do not know it, AppSee is a mobile analytics company, and the video data could be very useful for them. As a delivery application, sensitive information like credit card details and pin numbers can be compromised, and this search case, the zip code was revealed in the video recording.
GoPuff was informed by the researchers. stating, "AppSee could receive PII users (personally identifiable information)". A spokesman also informed Gizmodo that the AppSee SDK has been removed from GoPuff's Android and iOS apps with the latest update. However, AppSee claims that GoPuff should have informed its end users in advance that its data was recorded and sent to us for the purpose of analysis and performance optimization. However, in this case, both are partly at fault. Google Play makes it clear that apps must disclose how user data is collected.
Google responded to Gizmodo for a request for comment on the findings of the team and said: "After reviewing the findings of the researchers, we determined that some of the services may put some developers at risk of violating the Play policy. We are working closely with them to help developers properly communicate the functionality of the SDK with the end-users of their applications. "
Therefore, this study provides a respite to the users are paranoid that their pickups can be used to snoop in their private conversations. However, it brings another bad news that screens are saved by apps instead, unbeknownst to users.
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