14 DAY TRIAL // A large chunk of the apps that are available in the app stores can access users’ private photos, track their locations, divulge email address, address books and phone logs, which makes the current NSA scandal that much more concerning.
Bitdefender looked into 836,021 apps in the Play store for Android and the findings raise privacy concerns.
Just recently, it has been revealed that intelligence agencies from the United Kingdom and the United States collect data from various popular smartphone apps without the users’ knowledge or consent. Developers have already reacted to this and said that the spy program puts the entire industry in danger.
“Uninhibited collection of consumers’ personal data by governments hacking into apps is unacceptable. Developers are surprised and disappointed to learn that personal information entrusted to them by users has been secretly collected and stored. This surveillance damages our entire industry and undermines the hard work of app developer entrepreneurs everywhere,” the Application Developers Alliance states.
According to Bitdefender, over 35 percent of the apps analyzed can track a user’s location, 3 percent can access the location even when the app is running in the background. Furthermore, 6.66 percent of these apps can send the location over the Internet.
When it comes to divulging the email address over the Internet, data shows that up to 3 percent of the analyzed apps can do so. While some of them use an encrypted connection to send over the data, the others do it without any type of additional security layer.
Apps may also gain access to a device’s location, address book, phone logs and geographic data from photos uploaded via mobile apps such as Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Depending on the permissions granted upon installation, apps can process and send information to the developer or a third party.