Mobile Apps Could Be Exposing Your Personal Data

Lookout, a mobile security company, embarked on an absolutely massive study that examined the code of some 300,000 Android and iPhone apps. Dubbed the App Genome Project, it looked at a large cross-section of mobile apps and found that an unsettling number of them were accessing your personal information, and sometimes without alerting you. According to Lookout, 33-percent of iPhone and 29-percent of Android apps accessed the phone's location data, while 14-percent and 8-percent of iPhone and Android apps (respectively) were accessing contacts stored on the device.

Making these numbers even more worrisome is the fact that 47-percent of Android apps and 23-percent of iPhone apps included third-party code that could easily expose personal information or contain security flaws, even without the developer's knowledge. This reusable code (often from advertising or analytics networks) is also very difficult to patch and can cause trouble for numerous programs. Revelations like these highlight the growing importance of mobile security, which is, of course, the very business that Lookout is in. The company sells mobile malware scanning and data backup tools, so it certainly has something to gain from a little bit of paranoia. But as they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. [From: Lookout, via: New York Times and Venture Beat]

Filed under: Cell Phones, Google, iPhone