There are two big application markets for our smartphones, the first one is Apple’s AppStore in which apps checked by the company before letting them downloaded by the users. And the second one is Google Playstore, which is more vulnareble. Google only denies those are obviously will harm the smartphone, but still you can download some apps from third party websites. Some apps lock your Android phone and ask money for unlocking it.
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So a team from Eurecom in France come up with an automated way to check the apps and monitor the websites that they try to connect. And the team found out an extraordinary scale of connection attempts. They used a Samsung Galaxy SIII that running Android version 4.1.2, and downloaded over 2000 free app from 25 different categories from Google Playstore. They recorded every attempted to connect. And they compared the URLs that these apps try to connect, to the list that prepared for the AdBlock Plus projects.
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The result were shocking, the apps connect 250,000 different URLs across almost 2,000 different top-level websites. Even some apps that don’t require a connection try to connect almost 2000 different URLs. The App called, ” Music Volume EQ ” just for controlling the volume. The team say; about 10 percent of those apps they tested, try to connect to more than 500 different websites. Nine out of 10 of these domains run by Google. And more than 70 percent did not attempt to connect any user tracking sites. Also, some of them try to connect to sites that look like harmful for the smartphones. There not much you can do for avoiding this issue. You can use AdBlockers and don’t download apps from third party websites.
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Original Article: MIT News
Another Source: arxiv.org
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