Wednesday, September 29, 2010

2/3 of Android Apps Leak Private Data


According to a study of 30 of the most popular applications in Google's App Market, as much as 2/3 of apps access personal information in a way not desirable for users. The study stated that of the 30 apps studied, 15 reported a user's location to remote advertising servers and 7 broadcast the device number or phone number to outside servers. Nearly 100 percent of the time, the data was being collected without the users knowledge.

The study shows a large flaw in security on the Android platform, as Android users do not have much of a way to discover what information is actually being used when they install an app from the App Market. This study was made possible because the Android operating system is open source, so it is unclear how the Apple App Store would fare in a similar experiment. For the time being, however, one must be cautious when downloading applications until improvements are made.

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