So, if you were to do a Google search for a particular kind of sneaker and use Google Maps to drive to a shoe store and your Gmail account to sign up for a shoe store's mailing list, you can bet you're going to get ads for sneakers in your Chrome browser.Īnd, thanks to all that data-tracking software tied to Facebook, you'll probably see the same ads in your Facebook feed, too. And perhaps didn't realize-as few people do-that companies like Google combine data from their many free apps, creating a profile for ad targeting purposes. Still, it's more likely that, at some point, you paused to admire those sneakers you were discussing with your friend online, Miller notes. Imagine if others revealed usernames, passwords, or credit card information.Ĭlay Miller, chief technology officer for the mobile security firm SyncDog, says that while apps are designed to be "sandboxed," meaning they withold user data from other apps, data can sometimes cross over through a phone's operating system. In one case, a food-delivery app recorded video of the user's activity and shared it with a data-analytics firm. In Choffnes' study, the researchers also found that 9,000 Android apps were secretly taking screenshots or recording videos of smartphone activity and sending them to third parties. Many also track your location throughout the day using your phone's GPS and nearby cell towers or web beacons.Īnd Facebook monitors your browsing habits beyond the confines of its own platform, thanks to a tiny, transparent image file known as a Facebook Pixel that's placed on websites across the internet to track what you watch and read and place in your shopping cart. Companies from Google on down to the tiniest developer of time-wasting games routinely record personal info-names, birthdates, credit card info-simply by asking for it. When it comes to collecting data on consumers, there's no shortage of effective options. "But, they clearly are doing something that's allowing them to target those ads so well." ![]() "What we've done is provide some insight into what advertising platforms aren't doing," he argues. ![]() While that all makes perfect sense, it still doesn't explain why so many people believe they're getting ads inspired by private conversations, Covington says. If snooping of that volume was going on, undetected by researchers, he adds, it would probably involve state-sponsored hackers, who hunt for fish much bigger than the average consumer. In the end, given current technology, Choffnes explains, recording audio just isn't a very practical way to gather market intelligence, because accurately translating that audio into text for analysis would require massive amounts of computing power, especially if done on a large scale. They too found no evidence of secret recordings. Michael Covington, a vice president at Wandera, a mobile security company, says his researchers performed a similar study, focusing on high-profile apps known for large-scale data collection, including Amazon, Chrome, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Using an automated test program, they analyzed more than 17,000 popular apps on the Android operating system and did not find a single instance where an app activated a phone's microphone and leaked audio data. ![]() During the 2017-18 school year, researchers led by Northeastern University computer science professor David Choffnes set out to see whether they could catch a smartphone spying on what they said.
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