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Spy-alert! Your Android phone may be listening to you, & secretly taking screenshots of activities


Spy-alert! Your Android phone may be listening to you, & secretly taking screenshots of activities


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Some popular apps on your Android phone may be actively listening to you, monitoring your habits and even secretly taking screenshots of your activity and sending them to third parties, a new study has found. 


These screenshots and videos of your activity on the screen could include usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and other important personal information, the researchers said. 



"We found that every app has the ability to record your screen and anything you type," said David Choffnes, a Professor at Boston's Northeastern University.The findings will be presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium Conference in Barcelona. 



For the study, the team analysed more than 17,000 of the most popular apps on the Android operating system, using an automated test programme written by the students. 


In all 9,000 of the 17,000 apps showed the potential to take screenshots.
"There were no audio leaks at all. Not a single app activated the microphone," said Christo 
Wilson, Professor at the varsity. 

"Then we started seeing things we didn't expect. Apps were automatically taking 
screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties." 

Although these privacy breaches appeared to be benign, they emphasized how easily a 
phone's privacy window could be exploited for profit. 

"This opening will almost certainly be used for malicious purposes. It's simple to install and 
collect this information. And what's most disturbing is that this occurs with no notification to
 or permission by users," Wilson noted. 

Although the study was conducted on Android phones, there is no reason to believe that 
other phone operating systems would be less vulnerable, the researchers said. 




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