Study Finds That a Large Number of Popular Android Apps Secretly Cast the Screen To Third Parties, But They Don't Listen To Conversations (gizmodo.com)

Kasmir Hill, reporting for Gizmodo: It's the smartphone conspiracy theory that just won't go away: Many, many people are convinced that their phones are listening to their conversations to target them with ads. [...] Some computer science academics at Northeastern University had heard enough people talking about this technological myth that they decided to do a rigorous study to tackle it. For the last year, Elleen Pan, Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson, and David Choffnes ran an experiment involving more than 17,000 of the most popular apps on Android to find out whether any of them were secretly using the phone's mic to capture audio. The apps included those belonging to Facebook, as well as over 8,000 apps that send information to Facebook. Sorry, conspiracy theorists: They found no evidence of an app unexpectedly activating the microphone or sending audio out when not prompted to do so. Like good scientists, they refuse to say that their study definitively proves that your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but they didn't find a single instance of it happening. Instead, they discovered a different disturbing practice: apps recording a phone's screen and sending that information out to third parties.

Comments

I suspect...

[thegreatbob]

... that the following may be true:

People are far more forgetful of the actions they've taken online and how they could be used by data/ad companies.

People aren't entirely likely to notice ads without having some reason (e.g. just having talked about it)

Data/ad companies are far better about targeting their results than they were in the past.

People love a good conspiracy. I know I do.

Re:Ads under FIrefox?

[apoc.famine]

You don't have an android then, do you?

Because Google Play needs access to everything or it pops up complaints all of the time if you limit it. On a pretty regular basis I get a notice that Google Play is having issues because I haven't allowed it to use my phone, access my contacts, and whatever else stupid shit it wants access to. Instead of failing gracefully it's a constant nag, and they've been ignoring bug reports on this "feature" for 3-4 years now.