Are the apps on your smartphone gathering and sharing information about you with third parties?
New insight into how certain apps are gathering information from users comes from a study conducted by researchers at Northeastern University.
For the study, the researchers examined the actions of 17,260 Android apps to determine if any of them were doing something users were not aware of, USA Today reports.
Researchers found that 9,000 of the apps involved in the study featured lines of code that contained requests for using the phone’s camera and/or microphone.
Furthermore, 12 of the apps were observed taking and then sending screenshots while they were being used. The screenshots were then sent either to developers or a third party.
The researchers singled out GoPuff as it was discovered to be actively recording actions performed by the user. These recordings were then sent to the analytic platform Appsee.
The study revealed that none of the Android apps examined were doing things like recording user audio or turning on the microphone. The cameras of the smartphones running the apps also did not take any photos or capture any videos when they were not supposed to.
Northeastern University computer science professor Dave Choffnes speculated that Appsee could be used for examining the possible reasons for why a specific app is crashing while in use.
The people at Appsee, for their part, said that their technology was “misused.” CEO Zahi Boussiba added that they “immediately disabled tracking capabilities for the mentioned app and purged all the relevant data from our…
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