Number: IRCNE2015112676
Date: 2015/11/07
According to “itpro”, research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, and Carnegie-Mellon universities in the US has revealed many everyday, popular apps are tracking your movements and sharing your email address with third parties.
The universities examined the data shared by 110 apps on Android's Google Play and the Apple App Store to see how they handle data, including social networking apps, fitness apps, search engines and free messaging apps.
It revealed 73 per cent of Android apps share email addresses, while 47 per cent of iOS apps share the user's location, often without permission. Android apps were most likely to share personal information such as the name of the user (49 per cent) and address (25 per cent) while iOS apps were much better at hiding this information.
But these apps aren't regarded as malicious by Google or Apple in any way - in fact, they're 55 of the most popular apps available on the platforms, including Google, Instagram, Pinterest, Kayak, MyFitnessPal and many more.
One mystery the researchers were unable to solve was that 93 per cent of Android apps shared data with the safemovedm.com domain, which doesn't seem to exist.
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