Your phone is spying on you, confirmed


Your phone is spying on you, confirmed



A new study analyzes more than 17,000 Android apps that monitor the user without consent



Have you had a face-to-face conversation with someone and suddenly a related content jumps into the smartphone? Perhaps this situation is known and the question has been asked on more than one occasion: Is our cellphone spying on us?

This question they have tried to solve again and again, the last ones have been the researchers of the Northeastern University of Boston (United States). After months of research they already have a conclusion: "Our study reveals several alarming privacy risks in the Android application ecosystem, which include applications that over-provision their media permissions and applications that share image and video data with other parts of unexpected ways, without the knowledge or consent of the user », explains the study.

The research was focused on the search for microphones working in the background and the surprise has been opposite. The methodology carried out consisted in the supervision of ten Android terminals.

Next, a system tested each app installed in the terminal. The researchers downloaded up to 17,260 applications originating from different app stores: App China, Mi.com, Anzhi and the official Android, the Google Play Store.

The objective was to monitor what data came out of the device to third-party servers, especially in multimedia files.

"We identified a previously unreported privacy risk that arises from third-party libraries that record and load screen captures and screen videos without informing the user. This can happen without the user's permission, "the investigation details.

Many of the analyzed applications made captures, and even recordings, of the content of the screen. University researchers confirm that they then send that data to third-party servers.

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