Facebook, Yahoo!, Flickr Peek At Your SMSs | TechTree.com

Facebook, Yahoo!, Flickr Peek At Your SMSs

Be wary of permitting apps from accessing your data.

 

Apparently, privacy concerns don't matter to big internet companies, as one revelation after another keeps coming out. It has now been revealed that Facebook, Yahoo!, and Flickr can sift through your smartphone to read your text messages and even view your photographs. It has been possible for them to do so, with the help of mobile apps that users install on their phones. Along with the aforementioned companies, Badoo, a dating site, have admitted to reading users' text messages via their Android apps.

Indeed, many of these services clearly specify the amount of access to the phone hardware and data is required before they are installed. Users have generally been seen to agree to the terms and conditions without reading through the details and inadvertently grant these apps access to their data and smartphone hardware such as the camera. Users have no means to grant selective access to these apps. Having said that, they need to at least check what permissions it demands, as most users tend to naively grant whatever requests these apps make before installation.

Sun Products director Daniel Rosenfield has said that advertisers request such information. "You can sell your app but the revenue you get from selling your apps doesn't touch the revenue you get from giving your apps away for free and just loading them with advertisements", he added. Twitter has been reported to have copied email addresses and phone numbers using its smartphone app and storing the information on its server without the users' permission.

The next time you load up an app, make sure you read the fine print.


TAGS: Mobile Phones, Security, Apps, Facebook, Yahoo!, Jayesh

 
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