The study found that: mobile phone app does not eavesdrop | there are other means of monitoring users

The digital age has brought a lot of convenience to people's work and life, but the various advertising tracking methods are still amazing - for example, after watching the funny cat video for hours or days, suddenly found that cross-platform push ads include Related content. Conspiracy theorists can't help but wonder if the mobile phone is eavesdropping on every move in my life? After a year, researchers at Northeastern University pointed out that this is not the case, because they did not find any evidence that the app is eavesdropping on the user. However, This does not mean that the app has no other means of monitoring users.

A computer science team conducted an experiment in which more than 17,000 popular Android apps were tested to determine if they had invoked a microphone scam.

Some of these apps come from Facebook, and there are more than 8,000 other apps that send information to social platforms. More than half of the tested apps have access to the camera and microphone.

This means that when a user opens an app for any conversation, it is possible to be recorded by them.

With automated procedures as a way to interact with applications on the device, all traffic can be analyzed, but the researchers confirmed that no audio files were sent to third parties.

But soon, the researchers mentioned the limitations of the study, and they never explicitly claimed that 'no app has secretly listened to users'.'

Since an automated system is used to test the application, the end result may be different from the actual human experience. The automated system cannot log in to these apps, so you may miss the audio processed locally on the device.

At the same time, the researchers also noticed some strange phenomena, such as a few applications that would record or screenshot what the user was doing and then send it to a third party.

One of the apps is called GoPuff, which is a PostMates-like service, but it has a screencast and sends it to third-party mobile analytics company Appsee.

As a delivery application, users often need to enter sensitive information such as credit card numbers and addresses. Similarly, GoPuff records and sends a screen record that asks the user to enter a zip code.

GoPuff's privacy policy does not inform this that the user's screen may be recorded. After the researcher contacted the developer, it clarified this in the privacy policy.