Look out, iPhone users – Big Brother has an app, and he’s using it to keep a close eye on you.
Lookout Inc., a mobile phone security firm, scanned about 300,000 free applications for the iPhone and Android, and found that many of them pull sensitive information off users’ phones and send them to third parties without notification.
The data can include full details about users’ contacts, their photos, text messages, and Internet and search histories. The danger is that the data is then vulnerable to hacking and use in identity theft if the third party doesn’t secure it.
The code that obtains the information was included in the application by the developers to allow the applications to run ads. But the applications wind up collecting more information on the users than intended.
And users don’t even know it’s happening.
Part of the problem is that smart phones don’t alert users to all the different types of data the applications running on them are collecting, and iPhones only alert users when apps want to use their locations.
Androids offer warnings when apps are first installed, but most people just breeze by them without reading them.
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