Viral Chinese Selfie App Meitu, Valued at Over $5 Billion, Phones Home With Personal Data (theregister.co.uk)

The Meitu selfie horrorshow app going viral through Western audiences is a privacy nightmare, researchers say. The app, which has been featured on several popular outlets including the NYTimes, USA Today, and NYMag, harvests information about the devices on which it runs, includes invasive advertising tracking features and is just badly coded. From a report: But worst of all, the free app appears to be phoning some to share personal data with its makers. Meitu, a Chinese production, includes in its code up to three checks to determine if an iPhone handset is jailbroken, according to respected forensics man Jonathan Zdziarski, a function to grab mobile provider information, and various analytics capabilities. Zdziarski says the app also appears to build a unique device profile based in part on a handset's MAC address. "Meitu is a throw-together of multiple analytics and marketing/ad tracking packages, with something cute to get people to use it," Zdziarski says. Unique phone IMEI numbers are shipped to dozens of Chinese servers, malware researcher FourOctets found. The app, which was valued at over $5 billion last year due its popularity, seeks access to device and app history; accurate location; phone status; USB, photos, and files storage read and write; camera; Wifi connections; device ID & call information; full network access, run at startup, and prevent device from sleeping on Android phones.

Comments

Re:Da fuq?!!

[Mashiki]

Isn't Snapchat valued at ~25 billion?

Yep. And people don't think this dotcom bubble is going to burst anytime soon either. Then you've got stuff like Uber valued at ~68B, and blowing through 2-7B/quarter in losses. Think on that one, at 68B, they have a higher market valuation then the big-3(GM, Ford, Chrysler) automakers. And they manufacture physical products, own their own credit financing divisions.

My guess? We'll see that pop around the time that Canada's housing bubble pops. And anyone who thinks Canada isn't due for a massive housing price correction doesn't realize just how bad it is here. Here's a good kicker too, in Vancouver one of the really overly priced markets. The provincial government sets property taxes based on the "possible future valuation" of your property. There's people in industrial areas, who are going to see their property taxes go from $160k to over $1m this year and are looking to get the hell out.

Re: Da fuq?!!

[The-Ixian]

Yeah, me too