I've just found this article.
In brief, it claims that applications such as Angry Birds and Candy Crush are collecting data from your phone - including things such as logging phone calls - and sending that data back to the developers and being sold, primarily for advertising, but also to the NSA.
I don't know much about smartphones, or what various apps could or could not do, so the first thing that makes me go "hmm" is the question of whether it would be possible for a game to log your phone calls. Is an OS like Android set up so that such information could be gathered by a game application? Or are such things compartmentalised?
The biggest red flag for me, however, came with the claim that the NSA could use the information gathered by these applications to upload malware onto your phone and could use this malware to, for example, turn your phone on while making it look like it's off, and use it to listen in on you. Leaving aside issues of how much of a practical worry this would be for the average man on the street*, I'm sure I've read before that it's not possible to remotely access the mic on a phone and use it as a listening device. But, as I say, I don't know enough about the technology to say one way or the other. The one thing I can say for sure is that the few times in my life I've been accidentally phoned by someone's pocket, it's been impossible to make anything out and that if the NSA does have this ability, then it's probably not the most useful tool in their box.
So, my question to anybody more knowledgeable than I am is - how credible is this article really? It seems overly paranoid to me and I'm inclined to disbelieve it, but I don't have the knowledge to say whether or not what it's claiming is actually possible or not.
*If it's true that this is happening, then I don't think the issue would be whether I, personally, am in danger of anything I say being heard by authorities and being used against me, it's an issue of whether the government should have the right to do this. Besides, I'm not American, I'm generally law-abiding, I'm not a talkative individual, and I don't own a smart phone, so all those considerations are utterly irrelevant to me.
In brief, it claims that applications such as Angry Birds and Candy Crush are collecting data from your phone - including things such as logging phone calls - and sending that data back to the developers and being sold, primarily for advertising, but also to the NSA.
I don't know much about smartphones, or what various apps could or could not do, so the first thing that makes me go "hmm" is the question of whether it would be possible for a game to log your phone calls. Is an OS like Android set up so that such information could be gathered by a game application? Or are such things compartmentalised?
The biggest red flag for me, however, came with the claim that the NSA could use the information gathered by these applications to upload malware onto your phone and could use this malware to, for example, turn your phone on while making it look like it's off, and use it to listen in on you. Leaving aside issues of how much of a practical worry this would be for the average man on the street*, I'm sure I've read before that it's not possible to remotely access the mic on a phone and use it as a listening device. But, as I say, I don't know enough about the technology to say one way or the other. The one thing I can say for sure is that the few times in my life I've been accidentally phoned by someone's pocket, it's been impossible to make anything out and that if the NSA does have this ability, then it's probably not the most useful tool in their box.
So, my question to anybody more knowledgeable than I am is - how credible is this article really? It seems overly paranoid to me and I'm inclined to disbelieve it, but I don't have the knowledge to say whether or not what it's claiming is actually possible or not.
*If it's true that this is happening, then I don't think the issue would be whether I, personally, am in danger of anything I say being heard by authorities and being used against me, it's an issue of whether the government should have the right to do this. Besides, I'm not American, I'm generally law-abiding, I'm not a talkative individual, and I don't own a smart phone, so all those considerations are utterly irrelevant to me.
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