Some Apps caught sending private data to advertising servers

[robphelan]

including GPS coordinates and phone #..

Researchers sampled 30 popular android apps & found half sent data back to advertising servers.

Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers

I understand if they need it for service provided, but not for the sole purpose of data collection.

 

[RadOD]

Good read. It's surprising how little control we really have over our phones.

 

[robphelan]

Also, from the comments section over at Ars.... here's a list of the apps

TaintDroid: Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones

No details on which apps did what, only summary information. These were the apps:

The Weather Channel (News & Weather);
Cestos, Solitaire (Game);
Movies (Entertainment);
Babble (Social);
Manga Browser (Comics)
Bump, Wertago (Social);
Antivirus (Communication);
ABC — Animals, Traffic Jam, Hearts,Blackjack, (Games);
Horoscope (Lifestyle);
3001 Wisdom Quotes Lite, Yellow Pages (Reference);
Dastelefonbuch, Astrid (Productivity),
BBC News Live Stream (News & Weather);
Ringtones (Entertainment)
Layer (Productivity);
Knocking (Social);
Barcode Scanner, Coupons (Shopping);
Trapster (Travel);
Spongebob Slide (Game);
ProBasketBall (Sports)
MySpace (Social);
ixMAT (Shopping)
Evernote (Productivity)

 

[sremick]

Yeah I saw the BBC article and read the paper, but without them naming names it's just general info without any specifics that allow end-users to take action.

I want to know who the culprits were. They're being too nice.

 

[Super Noob]

Taintdroid... wonder how they came up with that name

Here is ther PDF document and page 9 has a table showing which apps requested which permissions, but didn't state which apps were the culprits:

TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones LINK

 

[KonaZXIII]

The jokes on them- My GPS ain't sending jack shit to anybody