Eavesdropping Smartphone Apps
Seems there are a lot of them. They do it for marketing purposes. Really, they seem to do it because the code base they use does it automatically or just because they can. (Initial reports that an Android wallpaper app was malicious seems to have been an overstatement; they’re just incompetent: inadvertently collecting more data than necessary.)
Meanwhile, there’s now an Android rootkit available.
spaceman spiff • August 2, 2010 11:42 PM
Things are getting worse, not better, with respect to sucking up more privileges and data than necessary. Example: I own an Android phone (Google Nexus One) and had installed the Yellow Pages app. – useful for sure. However, the latest update added the ability to read/write from/to my contact list. I uninstalled the application because there is no (to me at least) conceivable reason why they need to have full access to all of my contacts (hundreds of people at many companies and organizations). Absurd! I can think of reasons why I might occasionally want to add a contact from the yellow pages, but not that they should have full read access to my contact list! This is just a disaster waiting to happen, IMO.