70% of smartphone apps share your personal data
More than 70 per cent of smartphone apps are reporting personal data to third-party companies like Google and Facebook, a new study has warned. When people install a new smartphone app, it asks for the user’s permission before accessing personal information.
Researchers from the IMDEA Networks Institute in Spain wanted to know how much data could potentially be collected without users’ knowledge, and to give users more control over their data.
“To get a picture of what data was being collected and transmitted from people’s smartphones, we developed a free Android app of our own, called the Lumen Privacy Monitor,” researchers said.
Lumen keeps track of which apps are running on users’ devices, whether they are sending privacy-sensitive data out of the phone, what internet sites they send data to, the network protocol they use and what types of personal information each app sends to each site.
Lumen analyses apps traffic locally on the device, and anonymises these data before sending them to the researchers. “We discovered 598 internet sites likely to be tracking users for advertising purposes, including social media services like Facebook, large internet companies like Google and Yahoo, and online marketing companies under the umbrella of internet service providers like Verizon Wireless,” researchers said.