Sunday Times 2
Do you know how often your smartphone is sharing personal data?
Some apps for Android smartphones are tracking people’s movements every three minutes.
This is according to a US study that found apps can collect a device’s GPS coordinates on average of 6,200 times over two weeks.
The study also revealed that most smartphone users have no idea how closely they are being tracked, and many were surprised by the results.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University asked 23 users of Android’s version 4.3 to install software that logged app requests, according to a report by Elizabeth Dwoskin in the Wall Street Journal.
Millions of people are being spied on by free apps they have installed on their mobile phones, security experts have warned (REUTERS)
They found that even when an app provided a location based service, some attempted to collect more data than was needed.
Groupon, for instance, requested one participant’s coordinates 1,062 times in two weeks.
Meanwhile, the Weather Channel’s app requested device location an average 2,000 times, or every 10 minutes.
The main focus of the study, however, was on how users reacted to how often their data was being shared.
They received a daily message, or ‘privacy nudge,’ telling them how many times information such as location, contact lists or phone call logs had been shared.
Some nudges were alarming. One notable example: ‘Your location has been shared 5,398 times with Facebook, Groupon, GO Launcher EX and seven other apps in the last 14 days.’
’4,182 (times) – are you kidding me?’ one participant asked. ‘It felt like I’m being followed by my own phone. It was scary. That number is too high.’
‘The vast majority of people have no clue about what’s going on,’ said Norman Sadeh, a professor in the School of Computer Science’s Institute for Software Research.
‘Most smartphone users, in fact, have no way of obtaining this data about app behaviour. But the study shows that when they do, they tend to act rapidly to change their privacy settings.’
The study used a permission manager for Android 4.3 called AppOps.
During the first week of the study, app behaviour data was collected for 23 people as they used their own Android mobile devices.
In the second week, they were given access to AppOps, and in the third and final phase they received the daily privacy nudges detailing the frequency at which their sensitive information was accessed by their apps.
The researchers found that app permission managers were helpful.
When the participants were given access to AppOps, they collectively reviewed their app permissions 51 times and restricted 272 permissions on 76 distinct apps. Only one participant failed to review permissions.
During this phase, which spanned eight days, users collectively reviewed permissions 69 times, blocking 122 additional permissions on 47 apps.
‘App permission managers are better than nothing, but by themselves they aren’t sufficient,’ Sadeh said.
‘The fact that users respond to privacy nudges indicate that they really care about privacy, but were just unaware of how much information was being collected about them.’
While iPhones do have a privacy manager, it does not tell users how often their information is used or for what purpose.
© Daily Mail, London