# Are your Android apps spying on you?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-your-android-apps-spying-on-you/556435>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [October 8, 2010, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-your-android-apps-spying-on-you/556435 "2010-10-08T00:47:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![dzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/5f9b8f/32.png) [@dzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dzero)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2010, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-your-android-apps-spying-on-you/556435/1 "2010-10-08T00:47:38Z")

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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](http://www.pcworld.com/article/206710/is_your_android_phone_spying_on_you.html?tk=nl_cox_h_crawl)

> [@](#):
>
> 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.