Spent 4 hours hunting down why my phone was leaking location data

Turned out a cheap weather app I downloaded 2 years ago was selling my GPS coordinates every 15 minutes. Took me digging into app permissions on a Saturday afternoon to finally catch it. Anyone else found a sneaky app doing this?

3 comments

3 Comments

kevin_dixon8d ago

That weather app thing is super common actually. I spent a whole Sunday once checking every app on my phone after a friend told me his flashlight app was pinging servers in China. The worst one I found was a simple QR code reader I had used maybe twice. It had full access to my camera, microphone, and contacts. I deleted it right then and there. Now I make it a habit every couple months to scroll through Settings and see what each app actually needs. Most of these free utility apps don't need your location to tell you the temperature.

james_kim8d ago

On the QR code reader thing, I had the exact same wake up call when I noticed a simple barcode scanner app had permission to read my texts. Like, what for lol. I actually went through and checked all my apps last month and found a wallpaper app that was accessing my microphone every 15 minutes in the background. The creepiest part is how these apps hide it in plain sight on the permissions page where they list like 20 different things they need. Do you think there's anything we can actually do about these apps besides just manually checking every few months? I feel like Apple and Google should be catching this stuff before it gets approved onto their stores.

terryf628d ago

A buddy of mine had a tip calculator app that was requesting access to his bluetooth and contacts, which made zero sense to me. @james_kim gets it though, permissions like that are pure nonsense for something that just adds up a check.