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8% of Android Apps Are Leaking Private Information

Posted by samzenpus on from the sieve-phone dept.

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."

1 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. iPhone apps are just as bad... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you use the firewall program that you can download with Cydia, you will find that a majority of iPhone apps connect to ad sites, statistic sites, behavioral targeting sites, and many domains that have zero to do what what the app does. The end user has zero control of what an app can do, and any app can happily slurp your contacts and anything available to it and hand it over to whatever site it feels like, and only people who have JB-ed their phone would know.

    Android, it is more obvious because you don't have to jailbreak it to see the programs phoning home.

    For example, take some of the photo editing apps on the iPhone. If you look at them, they appear to just uplaod your photo to a website and do the core editing via that as opposed to the application doing much. So, that private photo you decide to use a 99 cent app to make humorous? It is now on someone's Web server, and they can (in theory) claim full ownership and copyright of the image at any time.

    For the tl;dr crowd, iPhone apps are just as nasty, but they hide it better, being impossible to trace unless one jailbreaks their device.