Smartphone apps harvest, spread personal information
Wednesday, September 29, 2010Publicly available cell-phone applications from application markets are releasing consumers' private information to online advertisers, according to a joint study by Intel Labs, Penn State and Duke University. Researchers at the participating institutions have developed a realtime monitoring service called TaintDroid that precisely analyzes how private information is obtained and released by applications "downloaded" to consumer phones. TaintDroid is an extension to the Android mobile-phone platform that tracks the flow of sensitive data through third-party applications. (more)














