By David Talbot, Technology Review
To guard against malicious behavior, apps that run on Android smart phones must ask politely for permission to do things like access your personal information, track your location, or transmit data via the Internet. But once they have approval, these apps can share the permissions with the advertising libraries they use to serve up ads, creating serious potential privacy and security vulnerabilities, researchers have found. Combing through 100,000 apps selected randomly from Google Play (the erstwhile Android Market), a team of researchers at North Carolina State University found that 48,139 of the ad libraries used by these apps tracked the user’s GPS location; 18,575 tracked the identity of the phone (its IMEI number); 4,190 let advertisers track the user via GPS; and 4,047 accessed the device’s phone number.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39935/?p1=A1
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