Surprise people, this could turn out a shocker for real: researchers have come to the discovery that apps available in both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store most time transmit personal information to several sources, often without the notification or approval of the user.
The researchers have put about 110 popular free apps to the test, 55 came from each app store, and watching out particularly for the manner in which and even where these apps shared personal information. Then they came to the findings that going by an average, Android apps distribute user information to 3.1 third-party domains, and then iOS apps distribute equally such data to 2.6 third-party domains.
The circumstance here looks worse on the side of Android than it is on iOS. Seventy-three percent of the Play Store apps put to the test send the email address of users to third-parties, then forty-nine percent send the user’s name, thirty-three percent send the handset’s present GPS coordinates, and then twenty-five percent send addresses, while twenty percent sent IMEI information.
Then moving on to iOS, they saw that 47% of apps have been sending the user’s current location, 18% have been sending the user’s name, and then 16% have been sending the email address of the user. Then examining the domains which the data were being transmitted, google.com was the most notorious, with 36% of all apps transferring data there, and then 18% of apps made use of googleapis.com, and then facebook.com by 14%.
The discovery most disturbing however was that some health-related apps had been transferring potentially delicate user information to third-party domains. An app from Drugs.com, for instance, sent some symptom information to five domains, among which were advertisers like DoubleClick.
Tracker Lite was also involved in sending symptom information to third parties. It is thus important to know here that this information is being transferred to third parties with approval, for these apps would need a user’s approval to acquire the data they would possibly transfer.
However, the apps often don’t usually bring users to the knowledge that the data they had a consensus about to share, is eventually being transferred to third-parties, as many of these users will often accept permission requests without critically examining them when they are presented.
The researchers are of the indication that the only way to jump across the potholes of having your data transferred to several sources is to then to fill in false data anywhere it is asked. Another bright way around this is to selectively disable permissions for apps should you feel they need them, this you can do very well in some cases in iOS 9 as well as Android 6.0.
via: Just naira
via: Just naira
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