Privacy has always been a big concern in the App Store and for Apple, but really how private is your information? You’d probably call me a liar if I told you that hundreds of apps access your personal information without your knowledge. Sad truth is, almost 19% of them do…
Now obviously you must have the app installed for any one specific to knowing or unknowingly access your information. I’m also not going to get into names here, but let’s focus on the numbers.
Antivirus software specialist Bitdefender, has recently found that almost 19% of iOS apps access your address book without saying a word. On top of that, 41% track your location when you’re using the app without permission. That’s pretty crazy right? It gets worse. 40% of those apps aren’t encrypting their data. This means your information is just sitting in an unencrypted box somewhere that can totally be vulnerable to hackers.
These statistics don’t account for every app in the iOS App Store, but Bitdefender did a study across approximately 65,000 apps currently available. I’d say that’s a good and decent number to gather data from.
Chief security researcher at Bitdefender, Catalin Cosoi says this is worrying:
It is worrying stored data encryption on iOS apps is low and location tracking is so prevalent. Without notification of what an app accesses, it is difficult to control what information users give up.
We see a worrying landscape of poor user data encryption, prevalent location tracking and silent, unjustified, Address Book access.
iOS 6 aims to change this worry though. In iOS 6 apps will be required to ask of your permission to access really anything outside of the app. But it’s crazy to see such large numbers still doing this when the iOS 6 release in only a few months away.
Now I’m wondering how many of my apps are doing this…
Source: MobileEntertainment via Cult of Mac
