Smartphones do not eavesdrop on owners, but they can spy on them.

Scientists from Northeastern University in the United States spent a year testing a conspiracy theory popular on the Internet that smartphones can eavesdrop on their owners and use the data for advertising purposes. For a whole year, ten smartphones were constantly tested in “field” conditions - testers talked next to the devices and noted what exactly they were sending to the network. What did you find out?

Фото: Depositphotos

There are two news - good and not so good. The good thing is that the experimenters were unable to detect even the slightest evidence of possible wiretapping. The bad news is that it turned out that smartphones can secretly monitor their owners and even record their actions, says Tjournal.

Scientists want to refute the popular theory conspiracy that social networks and applications “listen” to everything people say around, and use this information to show targeted advertising. Recently, “evidence” in favor of such a theory has been constantly emerging on the net. For example, the editor of the publication Vice as a result of the experiment I came to the conclusion that he is listening in on the telephone. He talked about cheap T-shirts and plans to return to the university for five days in a row, and then he saw on Facebook advertising of clothes and classes in an educational institution.

Scientists from Northeastern University conducted their experiment to find out where the truth is. They used 10 Android smartphones and checked out more than 17 thousands of the most popular applications in the Play Market, which were previously given access to the microphone. Among the programs including was Facebook itself and about 8 thousands of applications sharing data with the social network.

Of the 17 260 applications that participated in the study, about 9 thousands had access to the camera and microphone, so they could, in theory, overhear the owner. Scientists launched an automatic program on smartphones that interacted with applications and recorded the data they send to the network.

After a year of research, scientists did not find evidence that the applications secretly activated the microphone: no program sent a single audio file to a third-party domain.

We did not find evidence that conversations of people are secretly recorded. What people really don't seem to understand is that there are many other possibilities around you to track everyday life that give third parties an equally complete picture of you.

However, the results of the experiment may be the cause of a new conspiracy theory - it turned out that many applications recorded the screen during use and sent this information to third parties.

For example, an application for ordering fast food, GoPuff, recorded when a user interacted with him, and then sent information to a domain associated with the mobile analytics company Appsee. This screen could contain confidential data, for example, the postal code of the device owner.

However, in Appsee they don’t hide that they record the actions of users: Online Companies this is claimed as one of the advantages of the platform. But the researchers were not bothered by the fact of surveillance, but by the fact that users couldn’t suspect it, since there was no mention of screen recording in the privacy policy of GoPuff. After the appeal of scientists, a point about this appeared in the document.

Appsee stated that the error was on the GoPuff side, and the company requires partners to indicate the use of third-party technology and prohibits the collection of any personal data. A company representative also noted that users can protect themselves from recording the screen on the official Online Appsee.

Google responded to scientists that Appsee could put some developers at risk of violating the policies of the Play Market, and assured that they are already “working with them.” Google policy requires users to disclose what data their application may collect.

The researchers did not say that the results of their work - the ultimate truth. Smartphones were controlled by an automatic program, not by humans, and they were also in a controlled environment.

However as marked the Gizmodo edition, the accuracy of the advertisements almost certainly did not come from the interception: it's usually just a good targeting based on the user's digital portrait.

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