Your smartphone may be spying on you by watching you

This is a theory we often hear: our smartphone constantly listens to us, thanks to the microphone, and then offers more and more targeted advertisements. Computer researchers have finally brought some interesting elements to the issue. Even if, as conscientious scientists, they do not exclude the possibility that their study may have missed out on certain actions performed by the apps studied, their conclusions are reassuring. After analyzing 17,260 popular apps on Android with a machine, they found no evidence of audio recordings unbeknownst to their users.

However, these researchers at Northeastern University discovered a practice that raises a lot of questions: some of the applications they analyzed, send screenshots or video recordings of the user to third parties. And the practice is not always detailed in a very explicit way in the authorizations that the companies ask the Net surfers to validate.

At GoPuff, we act after the revelations

Among the "guilty" applications, we find GoPuff, a service specializing in the delivery of meals at home, which made short video recordings of the various actions of its user on the service. These records were then sent to Appsee, a data analysis company.

It is therefore normal for users to be paranoid. As long as the smartphone designers do not warn that their screen is registered or does not give them the ability to disable this feature, users will not know what they are dealing with. Especially since the cameras and microphones of the smartphone are not the only "tools" useful for third-party services. As David Choffnes, one of the researchers, puts it, " what people do not seem to understand is that there are several other means of tracking in everyday life, which do not imply not the camera or the microphone of your smartphone and yet give an equally comprehensive opinion of you to third-party services ".