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If you have ever had doubts about your phone being able to monitor you, new research indicates that you are not paranoid. Researchers at Boston University, Northwestern, conducted a year-long study, trying to determine whether smartphone apps secretly recorded our private conversations to send out personal information to advertisers
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Fortunately, researchers have found no concrete evidence to support this longstanding theory. However, they discovered another disturbing piece of information: While you do not listen to the phone, it looks at you.
Research has confirmed that smartphone applications record video screen captures and take "snapshots" of your activities. The secret registration even includes personal user data – sometimes even postal codes.
Boston researchers have tested 17,260 popular Android apps, many of which belong to Facebook, and 8,000 of them send information directly to Facebook. Research has shown that more than half of the applications reviewed were allowed to access users' cameras and microphones, which meant that they could be activated at any time when the application was open.
Scientists used an automated system to interact with applications. any multimedia file sent by them, in particular to a third party. The focus of the research was on the audio files, but the researchers began to detect video clips and screenshots that were sent to third parties.
When one of the studio phones was using the application to deliver food "GoPaf" information about the phone's interaction with the application was registered and sent to the third-party domain – the company "Epsi" for mobile analysis. The video published in the company even included a screen in which users entered their zip code for food delivery.
The researchers noticed that "Epsi" was not defamatory because of its ability to record users' activity. but announced that the problem was in the ambiguity of the privacy policy of "GoPafa" for users. When the researchers contacted GoPaf, it turned out that Epsi had access to personal information.
"As an extra precaution, we also removed the SDK" Epsi "from the latest Android and OS upgrades"
"Epsi", on the other hand, says that "GoPaf" is guilty, and it was reported that the request for delivery "abused" its technology and that the conditions of service "Epsil" were violated. Zahi Bousib's executive director, Epsay, said the company was barring customers from tracking their personal information, and said that Epsi immediately blocked tracking capabilities and removed all images from their servers.
their complete results at the Barcelona Privacy Conference next month
Due to the fact that the studio's phones were using automated systems, not people, the researchers said that they were not quite sure that the phones do not listen to us. as they explained, because the applications may not have been launched in exactly the same way that people would launch them. They also accepted the fact that it is still possible to miss audio cases because the applications transcribe the sound before sending it to third parties.
So, it seems that we can not completely exclude the idea that our phones are watching us, but also listen.
East
