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Three Quarters of Android Apps Track Users With Third Party Tools, Says Study (theguardian.com)
A study by French research organization Exodus Privacy and Yale University's Privacy Lab analyzed the mobile apps for the signatures of 25 known trackers and found that more than three in four Android apps contain at least one third-party "tracker." The Guardian reports: Among the apps found to be using some sort of tracking plugin were some of the most popular apps on the Google Play Store, including Tinder, Spotify, Uber and OKCupid. All four apps use a service owned by Google, called Crashlytics, that primarily tracks app crash reports, but can also provide the ability to "get insight into your users, what they're doing, and inject live social content to delight them." Other less widely-used trackers can go much further. One cited by Yale is FidZup, a French tracking provider with technology that can "detect the presence of mobile phones and therefore their owners" using ultrasonic tones. FidZup says it no-longer uses that technology, however, since tracking users through simple wifi networks works just as well.
Tinder, Spotify, Uber and OKCupid, all applications that provide location-aware content may track your location!
Go to the apps in Settings and deny all that shit.
yvw
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I have a flashlight app from a security company that promises it is safe. I have my bank's app, which I'm sure is safe. I have 3 apps from online job sites, which I trust to be safe. And, finally, I have 2 network/wifi analyzer apps, which I trust to be safe.
As for apps that seem like they would want to spy on my as much as possible, I don't have any installed. Ones like Tindr, Uber, and OKCupid. So I don't really worry about apps tracking me.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
This isn't necessarily nefarious. My company uses Google Analytics to help understand how the app is being used. We don't track anybody with it (I don't think we even could if we wanted to), we just see things like what versions of OSes are in use, which features are being used and which aren't, etc.
But then maybe some of the other tracking systems let you do more spy-ish stuff.
There is no Android replacement firmware (well, at least not for most phones). Can we run the phone in a virtual machine? Some other solution?
I assume all Google Store applications track and use the camera, after running an Application I'll go into settings > apps and force stop the application. The Front camera has electrical tape over it, fingernail polish keeps coming off.
A game I'll switch to airplane mode as well.
I'm also inputting the info from https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/ into my router.
It's the best I can do...
For the past days we've had constant apocalyptic predictions about what could happen if so called net neutrality is repealed, but when we get more conformation about how much data mining is happening within the Android OS we get pretty much no commentary other than pointless off topic bitching.
And ultimately this is why I don't give a DAMN about Net Neutrality. Because I don't really care if you don't get the best deal on whatever consumer streaming service that might be affected by the lose of preferential treatment in terms of bandwidth. The entire fucking industry is just shot through with anti piracy and anti consumer choice corporations as is.
"Network Access" isn't a deniable right on Android, by default all apps get to speak to the net. Courtesy of Google, so no, you can't turn off that shit.
But it also misses the biggest of them all, Google doesn't need to profile the device to generate a tracking id, because it has its very own tracking id built into every device and sent to Google with all Google built in apps.... aka the Google Advertiser ID. Again you want to turn it off, but you can't.
As a side note, if anyone from Samsung is reading, could you please fix up your shit magnifier view??? It crashes every app with a text view by slowly filling up memory with bitmaps when destroying textviews.
Failed to allocate a 375744 byte allocation with 134640 free bytes and 131KB until OOM (TextView.java:14803) 3) So it creates one
android.widget.TextView.getMagnifierView(TextView.java:14704) 2) there is no magnifier view for it to get
android.widget.Editor.onDetachedFromWindow(Editor.java:470) 1) notice the view is being destroyed.
Application developers are refining the existing mobile application development processes to increase their functionality and usability. Reports suggest that the Android application store is filled with nearly 2.8 million applications, whereas the Apple App Store has 2.2 million applications. http://appaspect.blogspot.in/2...
The previous story was Researchers Identify 44 Trackers in More Than 300 Android Apps Are you saying that there is only 400 Android apps?
people will still justify using these goddam horrible devices (and no apple shit is even worse).
I laugh at the reasons people come up with, seriously its like talking to someone in a mental hospital.
Even Firefox for mobile contains two trackers: https://reports.exodus-privacy.... That's disappointing.
The linked page states that the detection rules are:
mng-ads\.com
doubleclick\.net
You could easily get false positives if it's plain string matching and the program contains those strings. The only other reason I see for Firefox to have those strings besides tracking that they are in a preloaded database of some kind.
Seriously. After seeing all sorts of app accessing my contact, my phone, my location, I decided to switch back to iPhone.
^(oo)^pig~
Google tracks my phone, my breathing, my movements while spyphone is on & phone location while spyphone is off but can it do so if Gapps framework & apps were not installed? With just LineageOS, no gapps, can Google still listen, photgraph & track?