A study of 30 popular Android apps shows that they would often use location information and unique identifiers with advertisers or servers, oftentimes without disclosing this to users. These findings came from researchers who will present their research at the upcoming Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation.
This information was found using TaintDroid, which is designed to track how different Android applications actually handle data and unique identification information. “Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, we found 68 instances of potential misuse of users’ private information across 20 applications,” reads the report.
“Android’s coarse-grained access control provides insufficient protection against third-party applications seeking to collect sensitive data,” they concluded.
Source: InformationWeek
