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Hit App Sarahah Quietly Uploads Your Address Book (theintercept.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sarahah, a new app that lets people sign up to receive anonymized, candid messages, has been surging in popularity; somewhere north of 18 million people are estimated to have downloaded it from Apple and Google's online stores, making it the No. 3 most downloaded free software title for iPhones and iPads. Sarahah bills itself as a way to "receive honest feedback" from friends and employees. But the app is collecting more than just feedback messages. When launched for the first time, it immediately harvests and uploads all phone numbers and email addresses in your address book. Although Sarahah does in some cases ask for permission to access contacts, it does not disclose that it uploads such data, nor does it seem to make any functional use of the information. Zachary Julian, a senior security analyst at Bishop Fox, discovered Sarahah is uploading of private information when he installed the app on his Android phone, a Galaxy S5 running Android 5.1.1. The phone was outfitted with monitoring software, known as Burp Suite, which intercepts internet traffic entering and leaving the device, allowing the owner to see what data is sent to remote servers. When Julian launched Sarahah on the device, Burp Suite caught the app in the act of uploading his private data.
Nope. At least on iOS the app cannot access your address book without you giving it explicit permission (apparently also the case on newer version of Android according to the article). Neither can it access anything else. There also seems to be much less worry about malware on iOS; most BYOD schemes I've seen require virus scanners, sandboxing and/or monitoring software on Android, but only require a strong PIN on iPhones (or the fingerprint scanner)
By the way, accessing the address book in order to find out if any of your friends are making use of the service is a legitimate reason to access the address book. I suspect it's an important reason for WhatsApp to become as popular as it did, since you didn't need to ask your friends if they signed up and what their handle was. But for this very reason you would expect Apple and Google to come up with a way to match friends on your address list without giving them full access, for example by providing a function that gives you a unique (for your service) user ID for each contact, by hashing a phone nr after salting it with the App ID or some such. That way the app can poll the service to see who signed up without requiring access to the actual address book.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
. At least on iOS the app cannot access your address book without you giving it explicit permission (apparently also the case on newer version of Android according to the article). Neither can it access anything else
The trouble remains that 'access' and 'upload the entire thing' is the same thing.
I suspect it's an important reason for WhatsApp to become as popular as it did, since you didn't need to ask your friends if they signed up and what their handle was.
Feature or bug? Maybe I don't WANT *everyone* to know I signed up. I signed up for telegram a while back to try it out with my wife. I was pretty appalled when a bunch of people at work started messaging me all over the place on it. We already have plenty of approved channels for them to reach me on; i was deliberately looking for something that I could leave running 24x7 on multiple devices... and not get messages from people at work.
But for this very reason you would expect Apple and Google to come up with a way to match friends on your address list without giving them full access, for example by providing a function that gives you a unique (for your service) user ID for each contact, by hashing a phone nr after salting it with the App ID or some such. That way the app can poll the service to see who signed up without requiring access to the actual address book.
This is a good idea. But even that is more sharing than I might want. They still get to build a social graph on graph on me that's bigger than letting me expose only the social graph I want to expose to them. They still know I am 'connectd' to all those people at work, even though i have no intention of connecting to them on the app, etc.
Games are notably bad for this too. I might wish to play a game and associate and communicate and share only with my wife and kids... but the social shit brings my sister inlaw in, randos at work, the neighbors, vendors and clients, lawyers and accountants, etc... not everyone on my contacts list is my 'friend'; and I don't want to connect to the vast majority of people in my contacts with any given app.