How Internet firms are reading your texts and emails and even looking at your pictures by spying through downloaded smartphone apps

By Damien Gayle
The small print included with many mobile phone apps is
giving their developers the right to rifle through users' phone books, text
messages and emails.

By agreeing to little-read terms and conditions documents,
phone users are giving developers the right to inspect their personal
information and even find out who they are talking to.

In many shocking cases, users are even giving apps the right
to collect whatever images the camera happens to be seeing, as well as the
phone's location.
Privacy risk: Smartphone
app developers have the right to access incredible amounts of users' personal
data thanks to provisions in little-read terms and conditions documents
Facebook, Yahoo!, Flickr and Badoo all admitted to reading
users' text messages through their Android smartphone apps, the Sunday Times
reported.
And many other apps from less well-known developers, many of
them available for free, are also including the rights to access your personal
data in their terms and conditions.
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Academics are now warning the many apps are little more than
'fronts' to allow companies to hoover up personal data and pass them on to
advertisers for a fee.

But the revelations also make clear that the wealth of data
collected by the new generation of smartphones could pose a serious risk to
users' privacy.

HOOVERING UP YOUR DATA: WHAT THE APPS CAN ACCESS


Location data
Internet history Text messages Contact book Online account IDs Who you are
calling May intercept calls Can access camera
Twitter: The site admitted that its smartphone application
transmitted data from users' private address books
Daniel Rosenfield, director of Sun Products, a successful
app business whose products are downloaded at a rate of 5,000 a day, said the
information was requested by advertisers.

'You can sell your app but the revenue you get from selling
your apps doesn't touch the revenue you get from giving your apps away for free
and just loading them with advertisements,' he told the Sunday Times.

Unlike Android apps, Apple iPhone apps are covered by a
general terms and conditions policy, which runs to astonishing 17,000 words.

However, the company also faced embarrassment earlier this
month when it emerged some companies with iPhone apps were harvesting contact
lists from customers mobile phone address books without telling them.

Twitter admitted that it copied lists of email addresses and
phone numbers from those who used its smartphone application and stored them on
its servers without asking users' permission.

Steve Jobs, Apple's late founder and the mastermind behind
the iPhone, himself spoke of the dangers of instrusive apps in 2007, warning
that many 'want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up.'

Chris Brauer, co-director of the centre for Creative and
Social Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London, echoed the concerns.

He warned that the ubiquitous smartphones have become 'a
source for incredibly rich information about people's lives.

'A lot of apps are fronts for various companies who are now
capturing this data.'
"Someone need to develop an app that avoids the leaking
of information" Yes the app is called stop using open to all Android and
use a windows phone or an iphone. Apple, Microsoft and Blackberry have more strict
controls of what apps go to their store.

HOOVERING UP YOUR DATA: WHAT THE APPS CAN ACCESS



Location data


Internet history


Text messages


Contact book


Online account IDs


Who you are calling


May intercept calls


Can access camera




Flickr


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Flixster


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YouTube






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Foursquare


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TweetDeck


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Netflix



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Facebook


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Ancestry.co.uk


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Badoo


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Angry Birds


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Yahoo! Messenger




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Shazam


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My Fitness Pal





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My Remote Lock





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