A study confirms that smartphone applications are recording video footage of our screens and taking screenshots of our activity and then passing those screen recordings on to third parties. The surreptitious filming even captures the users’ personal information — sometimes even their postcodes.
The Boston researchers tested 17,260 popular Android apps, many of which are owned by Facebook — and 8,000 which send information directly to Facebook. The study found that more than half of the apps examined had permission to access the users’ cameras and microphones, which meant that they could activate those features at any time when the app was open.