London : More than 70 per cent of smartphone apps are reporting personal data to third-party companies like Google and Facebook, a new study has warned. When people install a new smartphone app, it asks for the users permission before accessing personal information. Some of the information these apps collect are necessary for them to work properly. However, once an app has permission to collect that information, it can share your data with anyone the developer wants to ? letting third-party companies track where you are, how fast you are moving and what you are doing, researchers said.
Researchers from the IMDEA Networks Institute in Spain wanted to know how much data could potentially be collected without users knowledge, and to give users more control over their data. "To get a picture of what data was being collected and transmitted from peoples smartphones, we developed a free Android app of our own, called the Lumen Privacy Monitor," researchers said. "It analyses the traffic apps send out, to report which applications and online services actively harvest personal data," he added.
Since Lumen is about transparency, a phone user can see the information installed apps collect in real time and with whom they share these data.
Researchers try to show the details of the apps hidden behaviour in an easy-to-understand way. Lumen keeps track of which apps are running on users devices, whether they are sending privacy-sensitive data out of the phone, what internet sites they send data to, the network protocol they use and what types of personal information each app sends to each site. Lumen analyses apps traffic locally on the device, and anonymises these data before sending them to the researchers. PTI
Researchers from the IMDEA Networks Institute in Spain wanted to know how much data could potentially be collected without users knowledge, and to give users more control over their data. "To get a picture of what data was being collected and transmitted from peoples smartphones, we developed a free Android app of our own, called the Lumen Privacy Monitor," researchers said. "It analyses the traffic apps send out, to report which applications and online services actively harvest personal data," he added.
Since Lumen is about transparency, a phone user can see the information installed apps collect in real time and with whom they share these data.
Researchers try to show the details of the apps hidden behaviour in an easy-to-understand way. Lumen keeps track of which apps are running on users devices, whether they are sending privacy-sensitive data out of the phone, what internet sites they send data to, the network protocol they use and what types of personal information each app sends to each site. Lumen analyses apps traffic locally on the device, and anonymises these data before sending them to the researchers. PTI
Comments