Geek News: Free iPhone Apps Spying On Your Contacts
A recent survey by security research company Lookout has found that out of 300,000 apps on both the iPhone and Android platforms, 14% of the free apps on Apple’s App Store are capable of accessing users contacts.
As part of Lookout’s new venture, the App Genome Project – an “ongoing effort to map and study mobile applications” designed to “identify security threats” – the project looks into how much apps can access and derive data from our headsets, either by reading our own personal data such as contacts, or by utilising certain apps’ use of GPS enabled features with the goal of ultimately understanding why and to what use this gathered raw data can provide in terms of processed information.
The findings found that the iPhone has nearly twice as many free apps with these capabilities as opposed to those on the Android marketplace.
Speaking with Yahoo News after the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas last week, Lookout’s CEO, John Hering said “We found that not only users, but developers as well, don’t know what’s happening in their apps, even in their own apps, which is fascinating.”
“Part of the problem is smart phones don’t alert users to all the different types of data the applications running on them are collecting. iPhones only alert users when applications want to use their locations, and while Android phones offer robust warnings when applications are first installed, many people breeze through them for the gratification of using the apps quickly.”
Both Apple and Google have yet to comment on the subject, but these concerns are undeniably going to leave some users, both existing and new, weary of privacy and whether the trade-off of using a cool app despite its nosiness is worth it.
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