iPhone beats Android when it comes to keeping your data protected
At this point, most people understand that advances in technology go hand-in-hand with privacy invasion. Your phone holds an incredible amount of information about you—it has your credit card info, your address, your birthday and more. But what people might not realize is just how frequently apps on their phone are tracking them. According to a new study by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, 12 of the most popular Android apps track their users location an average of once every three minutes.
For the relatively small study, researchers downloaded software that logged when apps asked for contacts, call logs and locations on 23 Android users’ phones and tracked them over the course of two weeks. The study found that about a dozen popular applications, including Facebook, Groupon and The Weather Channel tracked location within 50 meters an average of 6,200 times over the 14-day period. That’s once every 3 minutes. That seems a bit excessive.
“One of the reasons they’re doing this is because it’s very lucrative for advertising,” says Yahoo Finance tech reporter Aaron Pressman. “Mobile-based advertisers pay a premium if they have a location for obvious reasons. If you’re near a store or in a particular store showing you a certain kind of ad would be much more likely to get a reaction.”
Pressman says that this data collection is a mixed bag—mostly because we don’t know where these databases will end up. “Will they be misused or will someone hack into them? If you become engaged in a lawsuit or divorce, these databases could be looked at by lawyers. It can rebound against you.” For the most part, however, the collection is pretty innocuous, says Pressman.
Pressman says that the iPhone is a slightly better choice for those concerned with privacy. On the iPhone, apps must request permission to locate you or gain access to other parts of your phone. There is also a control panel that allows you to limit access. On the Android, there’s the disclosure of general monitoring by an app but no fine-grained control.
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