Apps caught secretly recording smartphone screens

There is a number of apps are launching day by day with the increase in technology apps making life easy with one click but beware, you are watched by someone. People have believed that their phones have secretly been listening to them to gather data for targeted advertising, building a myth that a bunch of computer science academics at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, decided to look into.

They held an experiment that tested 17,260 of the most popular Android apps, including many owned by Facebook. Results may panic you.

Researchers have found that some of the most popular Android apps are recording videos and screenshots and sending it to other companies, without the user’s knowledge.

In some cases, the secretive filming captures personal information of users, including their zip or postcode.

Most of the apps found that more than half had permission to access users’ camera and microphone, allowing them to activate the features any time the app was open.

There is also a rumor that even Facebook periodically record conversation and keywords to the third parties. You might experience this situation where when you are chatting about some products or vacation places with your friends, soon after you may find an advertisement on the same theme appears in their social media apps.

A closer look at the results from the study shows that while apps were not listening, some do regularly record footage and screenshots of what users are doing. The software then forwards this information to third-party domains for analysis.

Researchers caught one app – the US Deliveroo-style service GoPuff – recording the screens of users and sending the footage to mobile analytics firm Appsee.

The app, which has been downloaded more than 100,000 times from the Google Play Store, took footage of a screen that asked for customers to list their zip code.

Even their privacy policy doesn’t give any notification regarding the screens could be recorded while using the smartphone app.

Once GoPuff was asked about it — naturally — they updated their policy to mention “Personally Identifiable Information” being given to Appsee.

‘As an added precaution, we also pulled Appsee SDK from the latest Android and iOS builds,’ a spokesperson told Gizmodo.

Appsee’s CEO Zahi Boussiba said the company’s terms ‘forbid customers from tracking any personal data with Appsee.

From the researchers: “Our study reveals several alarming privacy risks in the Android app ecosystem, including apps that over-provision their media permissions and apps that share image and video data with other parties in unexpected ways, without user knowledge or consent. We also identify a previously unreported privacy risk that arises from third-party libraries that record and upload screenshots and videos of the screen without informing the user. This can occur without needing any permissions from the user.”