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More Than 25% of Android Apps Know Too Much About You
CowboyRobot writes "A pair of reports by Juniper and Bit9 confirm the suspicion that many apps are spying on users. '26 percent of Android apps in Google Play can access personal data, such as contacts and email, and 42 percent, GPS location data... 31 percent of the apps access phone calls or phone numbers, and 9 percent employ permissions that could cost the user money, such as incurring premium SMS text message charges... nearly 7 percent of free apps can access address books, 2.6 percent, can send text messages without the user knowing, 6.4 percent can make calls, and 5.5 percent have access to the device's camera.' The main issue seems to be with poor development practices. Only in a minority of cases is there malicious intent. The Juniper report and the Bit9 report are both available online."
If only there were some way for me to tell which permissions an app will use when I install it!
I've installed LBE Privacy control and it blocks unnecessary permissions for many apps. Why does a keyboard need internet access? The only thing I'm concerned about... What does LBE know, and what does it share?
They should add more fine-grained permission, so that for example an application would only require 'access to add-server' instead of full network access. And please make some clear policy that gets enforced, i.e. applications that do ask more permissions than they need get banned until the problem is fixed.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
We need a website listing apps and what persmissions they require vs use.
Developers will start paying attention when their apps are publicly shamed.
Lets have a little balance
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/15/iphone-privacy-app-path-facebook-twitter-apple_n_1279497.html?ref=mostpopular
Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram all send email addresses and phone numbers to their local servers.
The whole thing blew up and ended up with US congressmen sending letters to Tim Cook. This was feburary this year
"This incident raises questions about whether Apple’s iOS app developer policies and practices may fall short when it comes to protecting the information of iPhone users and their contacts."
Butterfield and Waxman then quote parts of Apple’s iOS developer website which states that Apple provides a comprehensive collection of tools and frameworks for storing, accessing and sharing data. It is then questioned whether Apple requires apps to request user permission before transmitting data about a user."
That study is irrelevant. Most of those apps don't know that because they need to, but because they are free and the averts do.
Do the same study on payed apps. For example, GPS location access is not present on any of the games I bought so far.
The way things are setup on stock android is a nightmare. The supposed "Walled Garden" doesn't even exist. Android doesn't have malware/viruses because "legit" apps can walk right in and do whatever they want. Want to steal all your users contacts and use them for spam? There's a built-in API for that.
I was trying to download a widget for screen brightness and 99% of the free ones wanted internet access permissions. It was just absolutely atrocious.
The only redeeming feature is how easy it is to root and fix.
That operating systems like iOS and Android even give someone the ability to see that certain permissions are required, and by the compliment, that there are permissions that are not required, is a step in a good direction. That granularity feature is absent in desktop applications--essentially all permissions are granted by default. For all I know pkunzip could have been keeping track of all those file_id.diz it encountered in order to build a profile of me, then dialing some BBS to upload the statistics to. That might seem implausible, but since there was no central authoritative repository to download pkunzip, it came from a BBS. That BBS could have replaced it with its own custom version for tracking.
The larger point is that desktop programs could have been doing for years what people are worried about with tablet and phone applications.
That said, it still creeps me out to see a solitaire game needing access to my address book. Maybe this is a case of "out of sight, out of mind."
one that is the smartphone (portable computer) and that will not have sms, cell service, address book, etc. rooted and firewalled and monitored.
2nd phone would be a dumb phone that has no networking at all in it, simply just to send and receive voice calls.
until there is a hard boundary (enforced, like a true barrier) between the soft apps and things that can cost you money (dialing out, stealing your contact list or local data), it just does not seem worth it to bundle all your stuff into one box.
sure, its convenient but the trust model is not good enough.
more and more, I just leave the smartphone home and use it as a wifi only device. at least I know that no sms BS is coming thru and no outgoing calls or wan connects could ever happen that would be costly or info-leaking.
seriously, I'm demotivated to invest more of my personal info on a box that I have less and less control over.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I root all of my Android devices and install the DroidWall app. It allows me to block network access to any app regardless of whether you give them permissions when installing. It's allowed me to download and use many apps that I would otherwise not have used because they wanted network access. It even lets you decide if you want to block the app on WiFi, cell data, or both.
In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.
So is it going to store my phone number in a database somewhere? Is it simply going to avoid trying to send data if a phone call is active? We, as users, have no way of knowing. And, if they made the permissions even more granular, we would never be able to successfully wade through all of them. I need someone smarter than me to fix the design. But the design as it exists today is largely useless.
If you've stayed at a hotel, odds are good someone's seen you nude.
In that case, I'm glad I'm ugly as sin, and hope I've blinded them. :)
More Twoson than Cupertino
Denying permissions to applications that expect those permissions would cause the applications to force close when Android throws a SecurityException. How do you think force closing like this would improve the user experience?
I'm afraid of big corps than small application developers for giving my data. If a small company, or an independent developer gets my data and use it without my permission and that harms me, I can sue that guy or small company and probably protect myself. A painful process but doable.
On the other hand, I'm helpless against a big corp. I don't think there's any difference, since it includes profit and big corps can make more money out of it, in a way that big or small company can do with my personal data. Major problem is I can't fight with a big corp. I won't be able to have a energy and money to protect myself. They will do whatever they could do and I would be helpless.
It's important to educate people about the importance of their privacy, so there will be a common uprising against the big corps in case they do evil. People ignorantly trust big companies. They will accept any kind of pop-up, or warning you'd put and install their applications. Though they have no idea what could they do and what kind of power they have with these data after they get a big harm. There must be thousands of families or lifes ruined because of irresponsibility of privacy protection of facebook or google. Even I personally know couple of people affected by those. But I haven't heard any case these companies paid for their wrongdoings.
How would your crap application handle a device that totally lacks whatever you are trying to access?
It would rely on having been blocked from installing. Android apps can state that a permission is required or that a permission is required unless the hardware doesn't support it. If a permission is required and the hardware doesn't support it, Android blocks it from installing. I have seen this with newer versions of the ZXing Barcode Scanner on my Archos 43 Internet Tablet, which requires the "landscape" permission that Archos mistakenly left out of its AOSP build. The same happened when I tried to install the official build of this scanner on my Nexus 7 which has a front camera but no rear camera. I had to download the "LearnPad Scanner" and "Nexus 7 Camera Launcher" applications, which are rebuilt to allow use of a front camera. So the only permissions that the user can disable without risking a force-close are features that 1. depend on hardware and 2. have been specified as optional.
The problem I see is that, in order for most apps to do something useful. For example, if you develop an SMS app, besides permissions on reading/writing/editing/sending messages, you will need access to contacts data, phone state and identity. Looks scary, but no SMS/MMS app can function properly without these.
I've been developing a few Android apps and they almost all require some type of "unsafe" permissions to run...except one (a small puzzler game).
Similarly, many apps need internet permissions. You can still look at what the app does, and try to determine if it really needs all the permissions it is asking. But since the problem lies in how do the app creators use those permissions beyond their declared "privacy policy", the only reasonable solution I see, is to install a monitoring app for network access, as suggested by some posters...provided the app itself isn't spying on you...
Okay, just making sure I understand what you're saying - you install an app on iOS, but it's totally dead in the water (i.e., no permissions to actually do anything) until the user actually engages the app for the first time, at which point it goes through the things it wants to do point-by-point, giving the user the option to not allow certain permissions, while allowing others?
You don't really understand it, but you are on the right track.
The application when you start it has no ability to access protected resources (Address Book and location and photos are protected). Network access is not a protected resource, but since it has no ability to see any of your data yet that does not matter.
Now you stated "go through the things it wants to do point by point" on launch. No, that would be stupid. How could the user know yet what made sense to allow? That is BTW the biggest problem I have with Android, it's insane to think a user CAN know up front what permissions make sense for any application, even a flashlight.
So then what happens is that as you use the application, it asks for permission as the need to access a resource comes up. So only within the app do you ask to use your contacts for something, would it bring up an alert asking if it was OK for that application to use your contacts. Only when the app was ready to make use of location would you be asked if the app should be allowed to see your location - and so on.
can you cite a source for this?
Well you could just ask any iOS users or developers since it's the way every app works. But here is just one of many stories.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Many many apps want far too many permissions. But if you firewall the app it doesn't really matter what it knows, it won't be talking to the Internet.
What I'd really like to see in Android is apps running in a sandbox and you being able to deny specific permissions for any app (with the caveat that may break the app, but so be it.)
With iOS all the permissions and spying is behind the scenes so as not to confuse or concern the user.