Personal Privacy: Smartphone apps track users even when shut down - by Hiawatha Bray

Smart-phones

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that some popular apps are continually collecting information without informing the phone’s owner.

“It seems like people are no longer in control of their own privacy,” said Frances Zhang, a master’s degree student in computer science at MIT.

Zhang and fellow researcher Fuming Shih, a computer science doctoral candidate, found that some popular apps for phones running Google Inc.’s Android operating system are continually collecting information without informing the phone’s owner. Shih and Zhang only tested 36 apps written for the Android operating system, which is “open source” software — meaning users are free to modify programs that run on the platform. The researchers added software to Android that recorded the actions of each app on a standard Android phone.

Most apps have written policies on privacy, according to a survey released in July by the US think tank Future of Privacy Forum­ in Washington, D.C., which is funded by a number of technology companies.

But privacy policy statements are often so long and difficult to understand that few people read them, and they often lack crucial details, Abelson said. The privacy policy for Angry­ Birds, for example, does not reveal that the app continues to track a user’s location even when the game is shut down.

In June, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced an effort to create legally enforceable privacy standards for mobile apps.

The EU as far as could be researched does not have a Privacy Policy for mobile apps. 

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