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Are you afraid your smartphone is listening to your conversations? It's a conspiracy theory with a following cult: phones listen to conversations to send your targeted ads to Facebook. It's a scary notion, but most likely without foundation. The researchers found that smartphones do not listen to or record what you say unless you ask them, and they do not send them to anyone behind your back. Do not push a sigh of relief yet, as they could do something so sinister. Your phone may not be listening to you, but it may be monitoring everything you do.
A group of five researchers from Northeastern University in Boston analyzed the traffic generated by different applications to see if they listened to their users. send markers to Facebook for targeted advertising. According to a report from Gizmodo, they chose more than 17,000 most popular Android apps to see if they use the phone's microphone to capture audio without the user's knowledge. .
The apps included Facebook and its affiliates with over 8,000 apps sent information to Facebook. More than 9,000 apps under review were allowed to access the phone's camera and microphone. The researchers used an automated program to interact with the applications and analyze the generated traffic. They closely watched the type of files generated by the applications and if they were sent to an unexpected part
The hunt group found no evidence that applications were capturing or sending audio when They were not solicited by the user. He said that this is not a definitive proof of phones that do not record audio. Although such a scenario did not occur during research using automated mechanisms, a different scenario is possible with human users. They attributed this possibility to a limitation of the search that an automated system can not create user names or log in as humans.
However, they found screenshots and screenshots. The Gizmodo report cited the example of GoPuff – a food delivery application with 100,000 downloads – sending user interactions to the Appsee mobile analytics company. While developers share user information with analytics companies, GoPuff has made no mention of it in its privacy policy, notes the report. After being contacted by the researchers, GoPuff updated its privacy policy to specifically mention that it was given him personally identifiable information (IPI).
Meanwhile, according to the report, Appsee believes that it is about a GoPuff error. . Blaming the food delivery service for abusing Appsee's technology, the company said that tracking capabilities have been disabled and that all data records have been purged from its servers
Some developers may violate the rules of the Play Store. The Google Play policy states that the app must disclose how it collects user data.
In conclusion, mobile apps may not listen to what you say, they monitor every decision you make on a smartphone screen. And this is sent to third parties. So do not be surprised if you find Facebook ads reading your mind.
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