Study Finds Free Apps More Likely to Leak Info on iOS Than Android
Free iPhone and iPad apps from Apple's App Store pose a greater privacy risk than free apps from Google Play. That's the finding of the latest study by Appthority, which is in the business of evaluating mobile apps for companies.
On the surface, the Appthority study — released Tuesday during the RSA security conference in San Francisco — appears to find iOS and Android apps equally culpable of privacy violations. Of the 10 top-selling apps the firm tested in each of five categories, 60% of the iOS apps shared data with advertising and analytics networks. So did 50% of Android apps.
A closer look, however, revealed that iOS apps were far leakier than their Android counterparts. A full 60% of iOS apps gathered your location data, 54% vacuumed up your contact lists and 14% siphoned information from your calendar. With Android apps, those percentages were 42%, 20% and zero, respectively — not exactly laudable, but certainly an improvement over the performance of Apple apps.
