Kurt Shintaku's Blog

App Analysis did a study on the privacy of Android apps which was written about at PC World:

• http://www.pcworld.com/article/206710/is_your_android_phone_spying_on_you.html?tk=nl_cox_t_crawl.

From the article:

The researchers looked at 30 popular Android apps, including The Weather Channel, MySpace, Evernote, BBC News Live Stream, Yellow Pages, and Spongebob Slide. They used a home-made tool called TaintDroid to track what data was being shared and with whom. The skinny:

• Two thirds of these apps violated user privacy by sharing location data or information that could identify individual handsets.
• Half of them sent user location information to advertising networks like Admob or analytics companies like Flurry without user consent.
• Seven of the apps sent the unique device identification numbers of the GSM user and the handsets’ SIM card to its servers.
• Two of the apps captured the users’ cell phone number along with the ID number and the users’ geographical coordinates.

Based on a study located at http://appanalysis.org/tdroid10.pdf.