Unexpectedly detected, the smartphone is not secretly 'eavesdropping' but 'peeking' the user screen

In today's smartphone boom, a question that many users wonder if smartphones really "eavesdrop" on us? And to answer this question, researchers at Northeastern University Research Institute (Massachusetts) conducted an experiment with 10 Android phones running more than 17,000 applications.

During the implementation of the experiment, the researchers based on the operations were performed completely automatically by computer simulation program of human manipulation to analyze what happens.

Research results show that smartphones do not use secret microphones to record users. One of the reporters, David Choffnes, stated that they found no evidence that the smartphone secretly recorded user conversations.

But the report from the study also provides notable information that some Android applications can take pictures and rotate screens and send them to the remote server without the user granting permission for this action.

In particular, the report mentioned GoPuff, a service to order snacks abroad. Accordingly, the application captures the screen on the user's smartphone that may contain the ZIP code leading to the user area, and then sends it to the company called Appsee, a mobile analytics firm. Although it doesn't contain much important and non-dangerous information, who knows what will happen.

After this allegation, Appsee voiced and asserted that it was not wrong and "blame" for GoPuff to violate App Store and Google Play policies. After that, GoPuff updated the policy and removed the Appsee SDK from Android and iOS apps as a response.

Screenshots can reveal more sensitive information such as passwords, addresses, etc. So recording the screen is really a big concern and privacy issues are put in place. In today's technology world, users can be monitored anytime through many different forms.

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