A research team is increasing the mystery of wiretapping users and recording their data



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It is now fashionable to talk about something in your cell phone and receive a little later targeted advertising on your Facebook page on the same subject, for example if you are looking for a dentist or a friend You will probably find The ads on your page are focused on your dental brushes and doctors' offices near you, as well as the propaganda messages that reach your phone.

8000 [19659003] Application on the Android

Access permissions are required

to the camera

and to the microphone. [1965] 9007] These practices have spurred many to talk about a "big conspiracy" in which mobile phone companies and their applications combine with businesses, media and advertisers to spy on users, listen to their calls and turn them into commercials. To examine this hypothesis, a team of scientists analyzed and examined 17,000 applications running with Android smartphones, as well as examining the phones themselves, and the result was more ambiguous, the results did not show up. not solved the problem of wiretapping.

This in-depth study was conducted by a research team from Northeastern University, including Ellen Penn, Jane Jing Ren, Martha Lindorfer, Christo Wilson and David Covins, all of whom are university professors in computer science. Over the course of a year, they tested and tested 17,000 commonly used apps and traded on Android phones. Gizmodo.com has published a summary of the study, which researchers must present at the conference on the promotion of privacy techniques to be held in the Spanish city of Barcelona next month.

Application Run

Which of these phones and applications on which uses a secret microphone in the phone to capture the voice and send it to another party? The researchers then used 10 smartphones running Android from different brands and ran an automated program that interacted with the 17,000 applications studied. In the first part of the study, devices and applications were placed nearby by students from the university laboratory. In the second part of the experiment, the phones were moved and placed in a locker with sound recordings next to them that broadcast conversations, dialogues and various things that the researchers had already put in place .

Applications and check the movement of the For a pass created to and from the phone during the execution of the application, especially for multimedia files sent to another unexpected person.The only limitation of these Automated programs is that they can not perform certain tasks, such as creating user names and passwords to log into an account in an application.

After the review, the researchers stated that they had found no evidence that an application had activated the microphone unexpectedly or recorded and sent the voice of the speaker. user to another party. Personal Data

The researchers quickly stated that these The door is not completely closed to the possibility of wiretapping and the transmission of personal data over the phone, and some scenarios are only not covered by their studies: their phones were operated by an automated program and not by humans. "Things that happen and are not understood by ordinary people and users are that there are many other follow-up processes in everyday life that do not include a phone. or a microphone, "said Dr. David Covins. Who do you

Most importantly, the researchers found that there were more than 8000 applications programmed to request and obtain permission to access the camera and microphone, and therefore the ability to hear the owner talk about his need for food for cats or

Request for Food

The most striking example cited by the research team in this context has been the application of a name called "Joe Puff, an application used to help people who have a sudden need to sleep The first fast-food, and it shows that it records all the interactions between the user and the application and the phone, and converts them into text and video clips from the phone screen, and sends to a company called "ABC" specializing in the phone; content analysis of smart phones.

They found that ABC, which analyzes es data, is proud to be able to record and analyze what a user does in an application on his website, without including it in the privacy policy for the JoePF application.

The CEO of the company assured the research team that the terms of service of his company The company's customers have other owners of applications to disclose the use of a third party technology that works with them, in this case ABC technology and the conditions established by the company to prevent its customers from tracking their personal data.

According to the general manager of the company, the ABC technology may have been misused by the customer in this case and the terms of service were violated. During a review of the issue with Google, owner of the Google Play app store, a company spokesman told the research team that a party services provided by ABC could put some developers at risk. Finally, the research team concluded that the plot had strong shades of truth, but that it could not be achieved in direct listening to the phone, but in more than one place. form of monitoring and behavior analysis.

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