Are your Android apps spying on you?

[dzero]

Apparently, many apps not only send sensitive information back to their vendors as well as advertisers and data miners, but they even violate their own privacy statements.

article

The researchers looked at 30 popular Android apps, including The Weather Channel, MySpace, Evernote, BBC News Live Stream, Yellow Pages, and Spongebob Slide. They used a home-made tool called TaintDroid to track what data was being shared and with whom. The skinny:

[ul]
[li]Two thirds of these apps violated user privacy by sharing location data or information that could identify individual handsets.[/li][li]Half of them sent user location information to advertising networks like Admob or analytics companies like Flurry without user consent.[/li][li]Seven of the apps sent the unique device identification numbers of the GSM user and the handsets’ SIM card to its servers.[/li][li]Two of the apps captured the users’ cell phone number along with the ID number and the users’ geographical coordinates.[/li][/ul]

The article notes that the problem likely is not limited to Android phones - it just happened that they were the ones studied.