Your smartphone is spying on you, but not how you think
SAN FRANCISCO – Think your smartphone is spying on you? Researchers at Northeastern University looked at 17,260 Android apps and found evidence of a few that were snooping, but not in the way users have speculated.
First, the good news for the paranoid: None of them them surreptitiously turned on a phone’s microphone, recorded audio or sent it to someone without being specifically asked to do so. That puts paid to the conspiracy theory that our phones are always listening to us and using what they hear to target us with ads.
Also, none of the apps turned on the phone’s camera and shot video of whatever it was pointed at.
However, a tiny number of the apps weren’t benign. The researchers went through the initial 17,000 and found 9,000 had code that requested permission from the phone to use its camera or microphone.
Of those 9,000, 12 turned out to be sending screen shots of what the user did on the app along to either the app developers or a third party.
“This was actually good news,” Dave Choffnes, a professor of computer science at Northeastern and one of the researchers, told USA TODAY. “We wouldn’t want to analyze
9,000 apps and find that even
10 percent were doing that. That would be an awful result.”
The most troubling was the GoPuff app, which allows users in several cities to order snacks, drinks and ice cream for delivery. It was actively making recordings of everything the user did on the app and sending it to AppSee, an app analytics platform.
Known as “full-session replay technology,” it allows whoever is getting the file to see everything you did on the app, whether it was playing a game, typing in your address, your shoe size or your credit-card number.