Battling growing privacy concerns, researchers from the Rutgers University in New Jersey have developed a new app that shows users if other mobile apps are tracking their location.
Revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have got us all talking about breach of privacy. While threats from government organizations persist, some app developers are digging into users' privacy by accessing their location through mobile phones. Among the bad guys, there are always some good guys trying to protect people. Researchers developed a new app that warns users of the other mobile apps that are accessing users' location. The app, which hasn't got an official name yet, is currently known as "RutgersPrivacyApp."
All mobile apps are required to take permission before accessing users' location, and they appear in a form of default request disclosure before installing the app. These requests are the next thing to Terms and Conditions given before any legal proceeding, which people tend to skip most often. So, researchers found a way to alert users of other location-tracking apps.
Android platform does not allow an app to monitor other apps' activities such as tracking location, researchers said in a press release. But they found that they could use the "getLastKnownLocation" method in the Android Location API as "an effective side channel."
The issue of apps tracking users' data isn't new, and in no way less concerning even now. According to an earlier Pew Research, one in five smartphone users involved in the study had disabled the location tracking feature on their phones and another survey revealed that 70 percent participants expressed their interest to know about data collecting apps on their phones. Recently, reports revealed that popular apps like Angry Birds and Dictionary.com collected surprising data like users' location and device ID.
The under-development mobile app was tested on several Android phones and researchers found that apps accessed users' location more frequently than expected. According to the press release, the app shows a notification on the screen that reads "Your location is being accessed by [appname]" along with the app icon and a map. The map pins the location where the app had accessed users' location.
"Your app used to notify me and each time it did so I knew like which of the app was accessing location at what time. Sometimes I was like surprised, oh this app used my location sort of that way," said one respondent selected to test the apps' functions.
The RutgersPrivacyApp was tested on Android due to the platform's ease of publishing compared to Apple or Windows Phone. It is not clear if the app will expand its reach to other platforms after it's fully launched for Android users.
