Thousands of apps are taking screenshots to record what users do on their smartphones. Another day, another privacy breach, but this violation has taken the heights to a next level.
According to a recent research conducted by the Northeastern University and published by Gizmodo, some apps on your smartphone might be taking screenshots and transmitting video recordings secretly to third-party domains. Shocked? So are we. No it’s your turn to prepare yourself for another privacy storm, even if the parties involved aren’t of the same stature as Facebook.
How they find out and tested it?
In order to find out any possible threats to privacy, the researchers tried out 17,000 of the most-used apps on Android. On interesting note, some of these were Facebook’s own apps while 8000 others were capable of sending data to Facebook. They also check out the microphone rights required by apps however luckily were pretty sure that no audio files were ever sent out.
According to the report, since researchers tested the apps using automated systems, it can’t be said that utterly no data was collected via microphones. Though, there is no reason to be suspicious for now.
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For the research, 10 Android devices were tested using automated programs to cooperate with each of the roughly 17,000 apps, approximately 9,000 of whom had access to the cameras and microphones.
Apps that are said to be violating your privacy are too many but on eof them is GoPuff that shared details such as zip code with a mobile analytics company AppSee in the form of a video. The data-collecting startup has been open for its clients to get user-data. However, it has been powerless to share the same info with consumers, which surely is alarming situation.
But the real trouble is the medium that used to share the data itself. These apps record the video of users while users are using their smartphones. By using video these apps simply can note any kind of private info as credit card information, addresses, and passwords when they’re being typed, without the users even getting a hint of it.
On the other hand, Google is said to be working with developers to ensure they better inform users when they have been collecting more data than they would normally gather.
Day by day, more cases of privacy breeches are coming, and users are shocked about the level of these breaches. I mean, what can be worst of knowing the fact that your app can take screenshots or even record video of your screen while you’re using your smartphone.
