The appetite of apps for our personal data seems limitless. ExpressVPN
conducted a survey of 450 of today's most popular apps, and found a
tracker to permanently locate the user in each one.
A list of 450 applications, all downloaded at least 1.7 billion times, is available on GitHub.
Data potentially shared with the military
The case is more
serious than it appears. Because while no one doubts for a moment that
their smartphone is constantly tracking them, not everyone may be aware
that their location data is arriving on US military servers.
X-Mode
is one of the largest data brokers across the Atlantic. Following an
investigation published by Motherboard last year, revealing that the
company had close ties to the US military, Apple and Google decided to
ban applications containing the SDK signed by X-Mode.
However,
the conclusions of the ExpressVPN investigation contradict this
directive. According to Sean O’Brien, Research Director of ExpressVPN
Digital Security Lab, X-Mode code was present in 44% (or 199)
applications analyzed. 'Despite the ban, only 10% of applications have
been deleted from Google Play,' reports the researcher.
According
to ExpressVPN's observations, applications intended for Muslims (Muslim
Pro, Muslim Mingle, etc.) seem to particularly attract the attention of
X-Mode, whose SDK is said to be present in 10 religious or cultural
applications exceeding 67 million downloads.
read also: Chrome for Android: Google begins rolling out grid and group tabs
Nightmarish fake apps for personal data
Not surprisingly, dating
apps are at the top of the app categories requiring constant access to
the user's location. But more worrying for the less informed mobile
users: some counterfeit applications are also very greedy in terms of
personal data.
Application counterfeits are understood to mean
apps that seek to reproduce the aesthetic codes and functionality of a
real application in order to deceive the user. These are for example
Telegramy or Messenger App, which seeks to ape Telegram, or We Chat,
which seeks to entice users looking for WeChat (without space) into its
nets.
As the ExpressVPN survey reveals, these 'bogus' apps are
particularly loaded with trackers. On these last examples alone, there
are 20, 24 and 19 respectively. In the list, Google and Facebook
trackers, as everywhere else on the Web, but also sometimes signed by
Quadrant - a data broker 'which has been central in recent privacy
scandals, ”ExpressVPN - or OneAudience tells us. Yet another broker who -
that is to say - has been sued by Facebook for violating the personal
data of its users. Its code was found in 167 apps on the list, or 37%.
Source : ExpressVPN
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