Three-quarters of Android apps monitoring you – among them Tinder, Spotify and Uber

© Provided by: PROTO THEMA S.A. Three-quarters of Android apps monitoring you – Tinder, Spotify and Uber among them

Do you use Tinder, Spotify, Snapchat and Uber on a smartphone? Then you have to know that you are being monitored. According to a survey by Yale University’s personal data lab and the French non-profit organization “Exodus Privacy”, 3/4 of the applications downloaded by Android software users use “illegal surveillance software” to monitor what users do on their mobile.

Their research related to 25 well-known “trackers”, used for targeted advertising, analytical behavior and positioning, and analyzed over 300 applications. In these, it was found that 75% of the tracers were found. Among them, famous Google Play apps such as Uber, Tinder, Twitter, Spotify and Snapchat.

According to researchers, many Android users do not realize that these trackers are on their phone and do not know that their personal data is shared.

For example, a Google-owned tracker called Crashlytics is designed to track app reports that crash, but allows developers to “get user knowledge and import live content to please them.“

Another, named FidZup, can “detect the presence of mobile phones and, by extension, their owners.”

The authors of the survey point out that the lack of transparency for collecting, transmitting and processing data through these trackers raises serious concerns about privacy violations and can have serious security implications for millions of users worldwide. In this context, they call on both application developers and Google to increase transparency regarding the security and privacy practices associated with these applications.

Although research is not about iOS applications, researchers are warning that the situation is not expected to be better.

Source: www.protothema.gr