One In Five Android Apps Access Your Private Data

[smoky004]

The Android Market's openness comes with a significant hitch: a full 20% of its app offerings can access and share your private data. Some can even make calls and send texts from your phone without your knowledge or consent. Scary.
Included in that alarming 20% figure are several apps with no malicious intent. As SMobile itself points out:

"Without question, a majority of these applications were developed with the best of intentions and the user data will likely not be compromised."

So yes, you should take the figure with a grain of salt. But it's still an important reminder that as the Android Market ecosystem grows, there'll be more and more predators to populate it. [

One In Five Android Apps Access Your Private Data

 

[Pat]

There are always two sides of an open ecosystem! And for android its no different! I would have moved to android long back if its apps were as good as the ones for iPhone!

 

[malhotraraul]

There are always two sides of an open ecosystem! And for android its no different! I would have moved to android long back if its apps were as good as the ones for iPhone!

in time paty, in time !!

p.s. when a software is installed it does prompt you about that, does iphone's ....... ?????

 

[Lord Nemesis]

With Apple entering the ad business with iAd, I don't think the situation of privacy will be any different with Apple platforms either and knowing apple, their policies would be rather more inflexible and offer little to no choice to the end user (Just like the 2 iPads per person (credit card) policy they whipped up). So I guess the only major mobile platform that would be relatively safe would be Symbian and who knows how long that will last. This is not the age of honoring privacy for sure.

 

[Pat]

p.s. when a software is installed it does prompt you about that, does iphone's ....... ?????

Prompt ?? iPhone allows you to turn location access to individual apps on or off!!

 

[desiibond]

let them access, am least bothered about it

 

[galois]

I'm sure this is a concern for everybody.
Is there some kind of app that monitors the other apps?

I'm sure there must be something floating around....

 

[shantanugoel]

This "report" has already been found to be heavily biased. So much so that cnet has actually pulled their article about it..

Biasing:

1. Smobile's CEO and founder are former AT&T employees

2. Smobile has AT&T as their strategic partner

3. Smobile sells anti-malware and other security solutions and it directly benefits them if people think their smartphones are susceptible to malware.

Inaccurate report:

If any of you actually read it, they just compared how many apps request to read/write personal data. So:

1. This means they can be "potentially" malware but they are not malware.

2. All these apps actually need to access the data they need to access. e.g. if you use a contacts app, or a dialer app, they obviously need to access your contacts data but this report says that these apps are malware lol

On comparisons to iPhone:

1. Android actually makes you see what exactly an app can do and what all data it can access (so, eg it will show you that a wallpaper app wants to read your credentials, so obviously you will immediately come to know "before" installing that there is something fishy). Take iPhone on the other hand, where you can't see this info. And apple's approval process is a joke, then cannot find out such kind of malware'ish use firstly because they don't review the source of the app and inspecting binaries can only go so far and secondly, because of the lack of permission systems, apps can have self-generating malware code which can fool even the greatest of binary/api usage inspection tools.

So, please don't talk about what you don't know. I agree that android has lot of shortcomings as compared to iPhone in terms of apps quantity/quality/polish but security is one area where android is much far ahead of Apple..