Your phone's apps are not secretly recording your voice, but they can watch what you're doing

A group of cyber researchers recently decided to test the widespread belief that some smartphone apps secretly record your audio to collect marketing data.

They found it largely wrong, but apparently it contains a tiny truth.

Researchers at Northeastern University conducted a one-year study to determine if apps were secretly listening to you. Despite their best efforts, they found no evidence of this. However, they have discovered that some applications are not "listening", they just look at what you are doing instead.

Trying to analyze the behavior of the application

The group has tested more than 17,000 most popular Android apps if they record audio through the microphone of one smartphone. Some of them were obvious Facebook suspects, and 8,000 of them were applications that link to the platform and synchronize the data collected. From the set of tested, more than half had permissions to access the camera and microphone of the device on which they were.

The team used an automated program to interact with applications, so as to generate marketing data if they were listening. They determined that no audio file was sent to Facebook. However, they also specified a limitation to the study, as the system was automated and not a human interaction. For this reason, he also could not connect to applications, which may have deprived him of locally processed audio.

However, one appalling thing that researchers have noticed is that some of the apps were actually looking at the device screen. Several of them took videos and screenshots of what they thought users were doing on the applications, which were then sent to third-party domains

A particular application mentioned, late-night food delivery service GoPuff, had recorded a video of the application screen and sent it to a company d & # 39; Mobile analysis third party. As a delivery application, users regularly enter sensitive information such as their personal address and bank details. It's an alarming thing not to know if the app is doing screenshots.

Similarly, he also appears to have recorded and uploaded a video from the screen where a user is asked for his zip code. The worst is that none of this is mentioned in GoPuff's privacy policy, which means that people who use the app do not know that their screens could be saved. This is only after the researchers contacted GoPuff about the problem that they updated their privacy policy to specify that "personally identifiable information" can be collected. Again, you know how many of you would actually read a privacy policy update notification when trying to use an application.

Of course, just because some apps do that does not mean that they do it all. However, the best thing to fuel a conspiracy theory is some basic truth. And we may have just exchanged one conspiracy conspiracy theory of application with another.