Spy smartphone tool for Redmi
A half-blind security critique of a tracking app: it found that blatant flaws allowed anyone to snoop on a user's personal data. The critique fails entirely to express concern that the app sends the personal data to a server, where the developer gets it all. A bug in a proprietary ASN. Many proprietary payment apps transmit personal data in an insecure way. However, the worse aspect of these apps is that payment is not anonymous. Many smartphone apps use insecure authentication methods when storing your personal data on remote servers.
This leaves personal information like email addresses, passwords, and health information vulnerable. Because many of these apps are proprietary it makes it hard to impossible to know which apps are at risk. That developer seems to be conscientious about protecting personal data from third parties in general, but it can't protect that data from the state.
Quite the contrary: confiding your data to someone else's server, if not first encrypted by you with free software, undermines your rights. The insecurity of WhatsApp makes eavesdropping a snap. While there is not much detail here, it seems that this does not operate via the universal back door that we know nearly all portable phones have. It may involve exploiting various bugs. There are lots of bugs in the phones' radio software. This section gives examples of mobile apps harassing or annoying the user, or causing trouble for the user.
Samsung phones come preloaded with a version of the Facebook app that can't be deleted. Facebook claims this is a stub which doesn't do anything, but we have to take their word for it, and there is the permanent risk that the app will be activated by an automatic update. Preloading crapware along with a nonfree operating system is common practice, but by making the crapware undeletable, Facebook and Samsung among others are going one step further in their hijacking of users' devices.
It spreads distrust for contraception. Furthermore, the user interface of most of them was designed to make uninstallation difficult. Users should of course uninstall these dangerous apps if they haven't yet, but they should also stay away from nonfree apps in general. All nonfree apps carry a potential risk because there is no easy way of knowing what they really do.
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Apple and Samsung deliberately degrade the performance of older phones to force users to buy their newer phones. The Alipay Health Code app estimates whether the user has Covid and tells the cops directly. Any nonfree program could be doing this, and that is a good reason to use free software instead. Many employers demand to do this. For the employee, this is simply nonfree software, as fundamentally unjust and as dangerous as any other nonfree software.
The Facebook app tracks users even when it is turned off , after tricking them into giving the app broad permissions in order to use one of its functionalities. Keeping track of who downloads a proprietary program is a form of surveillance. There is a proprietary program for adjusting a certain telescopic rifle sight.
A US prosecutor has demanded the list of all the 10, or more people who have installed it. Many unscrupulous mobile-app developers keep finding ways to bypass user's settings , regulations, and privacy-enhancing features of the operating system, in order to gather as much private data as they possibly can. Thus, we can't trust rules against spying. What we can trust is having control over the software we run.
Many Android apps can track users' movements even when the user says not to allow them access to locations. This involves an apparently unintentional weakness in Android, exploited intentionally by malicious apps.
Xiaomi phones covertly send user data to China: report
In spite of Apple's supposed commitment to privacy, iPhone apps contain trackers that are busy at night sending users' personal information to third parties. But it is likely that most nonfree apps contain trackers. Some of these send personally identifying data such as phone fingerprint, exact location, email address, phone number or even delivery address in the case of DoorDash. Once this information is collected by the company, there is no telling what it will be used for. BlizzCon imposed a requirement to run a proprietary phone app to be allowed into the event.
This app is a spyware that can snoop on a lot of sensitive data, including user's location and contact list, and has near-complete control over the phone. Data collected by menstrual and pregnancy monitoring apps is often available to employers and insurance companies. This has harmful implications for women's rights to equal employment and freedom to make their own pregnancy choices. Don't use these apps, even if someone offers you a reward to do so.
A free-software app that does more or less the same thing without spying on you is available from F-Droid , and a new one is being developed. Many Android phones come with a huge number of preinstalled nonfree apps that have access to sensitive data without users' knowledge.
These hidden apps may either call home with the data, or pass it on to user-installed apps that have access to the network but no direct access to the data. This results in massive surveillance on which the user has absolutely no control. Facebook offered a convenient proprietary library for building mobile apps, which also sent personal data to Facebook. Lots of companies built apps that way and released them, apparently not realizing that all the personal data they collected would go to Facebook as well.
It shows that no one can trust a nonfree program, not even the developers of other nonfree programs.
The AppCensus database gives information on how Android apps use and misuse users' personal data. Collecting hardware identifiers is in apparent violation of Google's policies. But it seems that Google wasn't aware of it, and, once informed, was in no hurry to take action. This proves that the policies of a development platform are ineffective at preventing nonfree software developers from including malware in their programs.
Many nonfree apps have a surveillance feature for recording all the users' actions in interacting with the app. Other technical flaws were found as well. Moreover, a previous investigation had found that half of the top 10 gratis VPN apps have lousy privacy policies. The Weather Channel app stored users' locations to the company's server. The company is being sued, demanding that it notify the users of what it will do with the data. We think that lawsuit is about a side issue. What the company does with the data is a secondary issue.
XNSPY Cell Phone Spy – India’s No. 1 Mobile Spy App
The principal wrong here is that the company gets that data at all. Other weather apps , including Accuweather and WeatherBug, are tracking people's locations. Some of them send Facebook detailed information about the user's activities in the app; others only say that the user is using that app, but that alone is often quite informative. Some Android apps track the phones of users that have deleted them. The Spanish football streaming app tracks the user's movements and listens through the microphone.
We expect it implements DRM, too—that there is no way to save a recording. But we can't be sure from the article. If you learn to care much less about sports, you will benefit in many ways.
This is one more. Furthermore, they could detect only some methods of snooping, in these proprietary apps whose source code they cannot look at. The other apps might be snooping in other ways. This is evidence that proprietary apps generally work against their users. To protect their privacy and freedom, Android users need to get rid of the proprietary software—both proprietary Android by switching to Replicant , and the proprietary apps by getting apps from the free software only F-Droid store that prominently warns the user if an app contains anti-features.
Grindr collects information about which users are HIV-positive, then provides the information to companies. Grindr should not have so much information about its users. It could be designed so that users communicate such info to each other but not to the server's database.
Pegasus is an expensive spying tool and needs to be purchased from NSO Group
The moviepass app and dis-service spy on users even more than users expected. It records where they travel before and after going to a movie. Tracking software in popular Android apps is pervasive and sometimes very clever. Some trackers can follow a user's movements around a physical store by noticing WiFi networks.
AI-powered driving apps can track your every move. The Sarahah app uploads all phone numbers and email addresses in user's address book to developer's server. Google did not intend to make these apps spy; on the contrary, it worked in various ways to prevent that, and deleted these apps after discovering what they did.