Some applications collect GPS coordinates of the phone, on average, 6,200 times over two weeks.
“>The study revealed also that smart phone users had no idea about that were so carefully monitored, and many of them said they were surprised by the findings.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers asked 23 smart phone users with version 4.3 of the Android operating system, install programs that register their requests for access to a range of applications for personal information, according to an article published by Elizabeth Dwoskin in Wall Street Journal.
According to this study, even when an application provides a basic service location other trying to collect more personal data than necessary.
Groupon application, for example, collects details of 1,062 users of times in a span of two weeks.
Weather Channel application require the user location coordinates on average 2,000 times, ie once every 10 minutes.
The main objective of the study focused but how users react when were their personal data were shared on various online applications.
Participants receive a message every day, called “privacy nudge” (“Privacy Warning”), informing them about the frequency with which certain personal information – such as location, contact list and chat history – were shared.
“Most people have no idea what is happening. Smart phone users actually do not have any way to get this data about how specific applications behave. But our study showed that when people have this possibility, they act very quickly and change their privacy settings on the phone, “said Norman Sadeh, professor at the Institute for Software Research in the School of Computer Science, study author.
The study used a program (“Permission manager”) for Android 4.3 called AppOps. Software AppOps was removed from later versions of the operating system Android.
Although iPhones have a program of “privacy manager ‘, that informs users about the frequency with which their personal information is used by other applications and any order in which they are used.