8% of Android Apps Are Leaking Private Information

kai_hiwatari writes "Neil Daswani, who is also the CTO of security firm Dasient, says that they have studied around 10,000 Android apps and have found that 800 of them are leaking private information of the user to an unauthorized server. Neil Daswani is scheduled to present the full findings at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas which starts on July 30th. The Dasient researchers also found out that 11 of the apps they have examined are sending unwanted SMS messages."

Comments

Margin of error

[tepples]

Assume that the 11,000 app sample is representative of a category of apps on Android Market, and 8 percent of apps in the sample have detectable spyware. In that case, it's far more likely than not that the prevalence of spyware across all apps in that category is at least 5 percent. So do you dislike statistical methods in general, or do you dislike the claim that the sample is representative?

Re:Permissions

[elashish14]

I remember someone had a /. sig with a link to a feature request for Android that users could simply choose which permissions they want to allow an app to have at installation. I think this was the link: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3778. It seems to have a lot of support, but apparently we need more!

I also found this one too: http://androinica.com/2011/05/cyanogenmod-nightlies-secures-android/. I didn't read the link in much depth, but apparently it can do just what you describe if you root and install Cyanogenmod