Smart-phone applications such as Maps, News and Weather applications are in a position to know the position or location of a person using a Smartphone. The applications provide cool features which many users like and as such they are blinded by this fact. The other applications which are common on smart-phones like dictionaries, games etc are also in a position to ascertain the location and the movement that a smart-phone user makes. This is a feature that works without the knowledge and permission of the smart-phone user. Due to this, many software developers are working on a brand new application to check the activities of these applications. This application will be able to police and tell which application is maliciously tracking you and go ahead to provide a warning if the same occurs.
The developing of this application will be a huge milestone since this is the first of its kind. It will be able to enhance the defense against the application that always snoop around and spy on the users of Android smart-phones. This is not an easy task to complete, it should be noted that the Android Operating System is designed not to allow other applications to tap other applications information. However, Rutgers University technological team managed to device a mode whereby the Android’s API function is ascertained by the application and a signal is send any time an application sends a signal to get the information about the user information from the operating system. This is according to a review carried out by MIT Technology.
The aim of these hardworking researchers is to increase the level of transparency. Furthermore, by doing this, the Android users will be interested in the configuration of the privacy setting and perhaps many users will venture to evaluate the applications and change the settings that enable tracking by these applications. It is also an effort to ensure that the amount of user information siphoned by the applications is checked and as such the user will not be required to check regularly for the applications for data usage.
Boulder University research has discovered in way that the owners of Android smart-phones may only part with a minimal $5 in order to secure the information on their phones from snooping application. This has made the market to be optimistic because it will ensure that the information stored by the phone is secure and locked. There is also another paper which was tabled before Edward Snowden and published by The Guardian, which revealed that there exist the leaky applications which are constantly tapping information about the location, gender, phone ID, and other relevant information which are then submitted to the NSA.
Huge quantity of metadata has been the talk in many quarters in the recent past. It is now known that smart-phone applications are designed with security failures. Due to this apparent reason, the government agencies are using that to spy on the users. The burden of protecting the users lies solely on the companies that control the applications. In this case, big companies like Google and Apple should do so since they have an interest in gathering more personal information, to ensure the sale of many advertisements and to market their products.
These innovators are anticipating that through the innovation of this new application, there will be more pressure on these technological companies to reveal more and more information concerning the spying applications. The idea behind the new application is more like the Apple’s application “ProtectMyPrivacy” which also acts a line of defense in iPhones. The disadvantage of “ProtectMyPrivacy” is that it needs Apple’s iOS in order to function.
It is expected that the new Android app will be ready to download in Google Play in approximately two months time and will come with an added feature, hence being able to track the person who is tracking your device. However, the application has not yet been named. But this is not a big concern as the main problem was the shock that many showed when they learned that quite a number of companies have been gathering personal information using applications and mysteriously, this information has been finding its way to the hands of the federal government. For many people, this application will reveal many hidden secrets.
