According to AdaptiveMobile’s third Global Security Insights in Mobile report, 75% of the public may be giving away their physical location when downloading smartphone applications without being aware of it.
Common applications, including Angry Birds, Jaws, and Paper Toss, have access to smartphone information including country, city, GPS location, and owner’s name, and may contact up to 17 different domains to share this kind of information with advertisers and others, according to AdaptiveMobile research.
“Most people don’t give a thought to the implications of downloading an app, particularly a free app….The developers need to be compensated somehow. What they are doing is using in-app advertising, whereby they are downloading a software development kit from an ad broker and embedding it into the application”, said Ciaran Bradley, vice president of handset security of AdaptiveMobile.
“When people download the app, they are not really aware of the implications of it being ad supported. When they download the app, the terms and conditions are often not clear”, Bradley told Infosecurity. He explained that people are generally unaware that their location and other information can be harvested by the app.
Based on a survey of 1,024 consumers, 69% of smartphone users were opposed to such privacy breaches, yet three-quarters fail to read the terms and conditions, which include access to data such as physical location.
According to the survey, 25% of respondents are still not that concerned about protecting their personal data, admitting that they would be willing to exchange their details for a free app download. However, 75% said that they would pay more for apps if they could be assured of their privacy.
“There was a big difference between young people who were prepared to give away quite a lot of information for free stuff versus older age groups”, Bradley related.
Although 70% did not know how to configure their smartphone security, 60% have now vowed to read the terms and conditions of applications in future and 43% have also promised to customize security measures on their phones or seek further guidance from operators about it, according to the survey.
“People are downloading free apps without any consideration that there is potentially personal information being sent by their phones to third parties who are advertisers or developers, and they are simply unaware of it….We think there is an opportunity for the carriers to step in and help consumers fight back against the likes of Apple, Google, and Android”, Bradley said.