Good morning! Like many of us, my morning includes a warm cup of coffee, working my way through some E-Mails, and skimming through the blogosphere. About halfway though this ritual I came across one very interesting piece by the Wall Street Journal. To call this article a simple blog post doesn’t do it justice. This story is the result of countless hours of mobile application analysis. The WSJ worked with our friends at Electric Alchemy to perform an in-depth study on how some of the most popular Android and iOS apps (protect) disregard our privacy. During this study, Electric Alchemy found that you cannot count on mobile applications to “keep your secrets”. It was found that over half the apps tested transmitted data that could uniquely identify your device, a little less then half sent out some form of location data, and a small number even sent out personal information such as name and gender. The WSJ created an interesting and interactive portal to analyze their findings. It’s nice to see a piece like this use so much visualization.
It was also nice to see our tool Mallory was used during part of the analysis. We hope to see more uses of Mallory like this and are committed to keeping it updated and maintained. Once again, our hats off to EA and the WSJ. Well done!
Cheers,
Raj Umadas