8 Tips to Put an End to Spying Apps

Worried your Android apps are spying on you? You should be, according to a recent study that found several popular Android Apps regularly share your location and critical phone data such as your phone number with advertisers and others. Researchers from Intel Labs, Penn State, and Duke University randomly selected 30 out of 358 popular apps from the Android Market for this study. The computer scientists were able to track each application's behavior using a special monitoring program called TaintDroid developed by the researchers.

Here's a breakdown of the researcher's findings:

-15 popular Android apps sent location information to advertisers without requiring user consent

-9 apps transmitted a user's International Mobile Equipment Identity number, a unique device identifier

-7 out of those 9 apps did not mention IMEI collection in their End User License Agreements including one unnamed popular social networking app and one unnamed location-based search application

-2 applications transmitted a user's phone number and ICC-ID--a SIM card's serial number--both of which are unique identifiers

The researchers did not name which specific apps were behaving irregularly. You can read the entire paper about Android app security here (PDF) and you can find out more about TaintDroid here.