Apple and Android Apps Share Your Emails and Location Data:
These findings were discovered in a research named “Who knows what about me”, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT), Harvard and Carnegie-Mellon universities which studied 110 apps available on Google Play and the Apple App Store, says BBC. In most cases, the Android Apps would leak data to Google and Facebook and most of them are those apps that offer free calls and text. When it comes to iOS, Localscope app was proven to be most leaky, sending data to 17 third-party domains.
Research also showed that 3 out of 30 apps relating to fitness and health management will leak data to the third party.
In simple words, if you are wearing a smartwatch and typing on a keyboard, the vulnerable motion sensors on your smartwatch can expose what you are typing.
However, at this time the team can’t detect special characters such as symbols, numbers and punctuation used in passwords.
A survey of 2000 Americans by the Pew Research Centre showed that 54% of the users would not install apps after learning how much of their data would be leaked while around 30% said they have uninstalled the apps. At the same time, 30% of smartphone owners turned off the location tracking on their phone.
Such findings may not be surprising for the users anymore. The Android OS is well known for its increasing security flaws, in fact according to researchers cyber criminal are developing one Android malware every 17 seconds and 1 in every 5 Android Apps is Malware.
Meanwhile, Apple is known for its tight security but in past few months several of its iOS versions were successfully targeted by cyber criminals.
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