Reveal that three out of four cell phone apps track user data

An investigation that was released by the UK press revealed that three out of four Android applications contain “third-party” An investigation that was released by the UK press revealed that three out of four Android applications contain “third-party” crawlers that collect information from people with various purposes.According to a study conducted by the French organization Exodus Privacy and Yale University, in England, Tinder, Spotify and Uber are some of the applications that use some type of complement to follow up in order to use that data to fine-tune their advertising campaigns. These applications use a Google-owned service, called Crashlytics, which mainly tracks bug reports, but can also provide the ability to “get information about their users, what they’re doing and include social content to delight them,” the researchers said. Other less-used trackers can go much further, such as FidZup, a French tracking provider with technology capable of “detecting the presence of mobile devices and therefore their owners” when using ultrasonic tones. “Android users, and users of all app stores, deserve a reliable chain of development, distribution and installation of software that does not include unknown or masked third-party code,” the researchers said. “Privacy advocates and security researchers should be alarmed by the data, and can provide deeper analysis now that this discovery and the Exodus platform have been made public,” they added. While Yale did not examine applications for iOS, the company warned that the situation would not be better in the Apple App Store. “Many of the same companies that distribute apps on Google Play also do so via Apple, and the tracking firms openly advertise software development kits compatible with multiple platforms,” the researchers said. “Therefore,” they added, “advertising trackers can be packaged simultaneously for Android and iOS, as well as for darker mobile platforms.”]]>