Remember that time while installing an app, you agreeing to all the terms and conditions without giving much thought. Well, here is some news for you. You are under constant vigil of your beloved apps. The apps you had installed for your assistance are spying on you.
The news came into limelight when a team of computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a research on 23 random Android 4.3 users from Craigslist and the Carnegie Mellon University’s student body. The results were astounding yet worrisome. More than a dozen Android apps including some as famous as GROUPON , FACEBOOK, GO LAUNCHER EX and several others collect the location data from your phones up to as near as 50 meters from your actual position; 6200 times a week or roughly every 3 minutes.
And this doesn’t end here. Even your call logs, the gallery items and your calendar entries; everything is on record with the app publisher. Some apps would ask for the location far more than usual.
Norman M. Sadeh, a Carnegie Mellon professor who co-authored the study asked
“Does Groupon really need to know where you are every 20 minutes?”
“The person would have to be accessing Groupon in their sleep.”
Now some of the apps are answerable for there intrusion such as Navigation apps or Weather forecasting apps, but some are just blatantly invading the privacy of un-awared users. Some pre-installed services like Google Play services distribute these information to variety of apps. What’s worse is you can’t even delete this one.
Also the purpose of inquiring about the users’ location is to know their interests and thus flooding them with so called relevant advertisements. Boosting the business of the nearby store is one of the major reasons of this peaking.
Into the times when the security and privacy are the foremost concerns on everyone’s mind, this report just might cause unwarranted suspicion among the general public.
Does this research findings make you uncomfortable? Tell us in comments below!
