Here is the Technical presentation. The iBeacon lets stores determine exactly where the iThing is, and get other info too.
mSpy Android Phone Tracker
The iThing also tells Apple its geolocation by default, though that can be turned off. There is also a feature for web sites to track users, which is enabled by default. That article talks about iOS 6, but it is still true in iOS 7. Users cannot make an Apple ID necessary to install even gratis apps without giving a valid email address and receiving the verification code Apple sends to it. Baidu apps were caught collecting sensitive personal data that can be used for lifetime tracking of users, and putting them in danger. More than 1. Data collected by Baidu may be handed over to the Chinese government, possibly putting Chinese people in danger.
Samsung is forcing its smartphone users in Hong Kong and Macau to use a public DNS in Mainland China , using software update released in September , which causes many unease and privacy concerns. Xiaomi phones report many actions the user takes : starting an app, looking at a folder, visiting a website, listening to a song.
They send device identifying information too. Other nonfree programs snoop too. For instance, Spotify and other streaming dis-services make a dossier about each user, and they make users identify themselves to pay. Out, out, damned Spotify!
Forbes exonerates the same wrongs when the culprits are not Chinese, but we condemn this no matter who does it. An Android phone was observed to track location even while in airplane mode. It didn't send the location data while in airplane mode. Instead, it saved up the data, and sent them all later. Some portable phones are sold with spyware sending lots of data to China. Google Play a component of Android tracks the users' movements without their permission.
Even if you disable Google Maps and location tracking, you must disable Google Play itself to completely stop the tracking. This is yet another example of nonfree software pretending to obey the user, when it's actually doing something else. Such a thing would be almost unthinkable with free software. Samsung phones come with apps that users can't delete , and they send so much data that their transmission is a substantial expense for users. Said transmission, not wanted or requested by the user, clearly must constitute spying of some kind.
Samsung's back door provides access to any file on the system. Spyware in Android phones and Windows? Here is more info. Spyware is present in some Android devices when they are sold. Some Motorola phones, made when this company was owned by Google, use a modified version of Android that sends personal data to Motorola.
A Motorola phone listens for voice all the time. Google Play intentionally sends app developers the personal details of users that install the app. Google should clearly and honestly identify the information it collects on users, instead of hiding it in an obscurely worded EULA. However, to truly protect people's privacy, we must prevent Google and other companies from getting this personal information in the first place! Some manufacturers add a hidden general surveillance package such as Carrier IQ.
E-books can contain JavaScript code, and sometimes this code snoops on readers. Spyware in many e-readers—not only the Kindle: they report even which page the user reads at what time. Microsoft's Office suite enables employers to snoop on each employee. After a public outburst, Microsoft stated that it would remove this capability. Let's hope so. Mozilla and Google removed the problematic extensions from their stores, but this shows once more how unsafe nonfree software can be. Tools that are supposed to protect a proprietary system are, instead, infecting it with additional malware the system itself being the original malware.
Foundry's graphics software reports information to identify who is running it. The result is often a legal threat demanding a lot of money. This illustrates that making unauthorized copies of nonfree software is not a cure for the injustice of nonfree software. It may avoid paying for the nasty thing, but cannot make it less nasty. Many cr…apps, developed by various companies for various organizations, do location tracking unknown to those companies and those organizations. It's actually some widely used libraries that do the tracking. What's unusual here is that proprietary software developer A tricks proprietary software developers B1 … B50 into making platforms for A to mistreat the end user.
According to the article, Zoom and Facebook don't even mention this surveillance on their privacy policy page, making this an obvious violation of people's privacy even in their own terms. The Alipay Health Code app estimates whether the user has Covid and tells the cops directly. The Amazon Ring app does surveillance for other companies as well as for Amazon. Any nonfree program could be doing this, and that is a good reason to use free software instead. Many employers demand to do this. For the employee, this is simply nonfree software, as fundamentally unjust and as dangerous as any other nonfree software.
Hacking Team Spying Tool Listens to Calls
The Facebook app tracks users even when it is turned off , after tricking them into giving the app broad permissions in order to use one of its functionalities. Keeping track of who downloads a proprietary program is a form of surveillance. There is a proprietary program for adjusting a certain telescopic rifle sight.
A US prosecutor has demanded the list of all the 10, or more people who have installed it. Many unscrupulous mobile-app developers keep finding ways to bypass user's settings , regulations, and privacy-enhancing features of the operating system, in order to gather as much private data as they possibly can. Thus, we can't trust rules against spying. What we can trust is having control over the software we run.
Many Android apps can track users' movements even when the user says not to allow them access to locations. This involves an apparently unintentional weakness in Android, exploited intentionally by malicious apps. It spreads distrust for contraception. BlizzCon imposed a requirement to run a proprietary phone app to be allowed into the event.
This app is a spyware that can snoop on a lot of sensitive data, including user's location and contact list, and has near-complete control over the phone. Data collected by menstrual and pregnancy monitoring apps is often available to employers and insurance companies. This has harmful implications for women's rights to equal employment and freedom to make their own pregnancy choices.
Don't use these apps, even if someone offers you a reward to do so. A free-software app that does more or less the same thing without spying on you is available from F-Droid , and a new one is being developed. Google tracks the movements of Android phones and iPhones running Google apps, and sometimes saves the data for years.
Many Android phones come with a huge number of preinstalled nonfree apps that have access to sensitive data without users' knowledge. These hidden apps may either call home with the data, or pass it on to user-installed apps that have access to the network but no direct access to the data.
5 smartphone spy apps that could be listening and watching you right now -
This results in massive surveillance on which the user has absolutely no control. Facebook offered a convenient proprietary library for building mobile apps, which also sent personal data to Facebook. Lots of companies built apps that way and released them, apparently not realizing that all the personal data they collected would go to Facebook as well. It shows that no one can trust a nonfree program, not even the developers of other nonfree programs.
The AppCensus database gives information on how Android apps use and misuse users' personal data. Collecting hardware identifiers is in apparent violation of Google's policies. But it seems that Google wasn't aware of it, and, once informed, was in no hurry to take action. This proves that the policies of a development platform are ineffective at preventing nonfree software developers from including malware in their programs. Many nonfree apps have a surveillance feature for recording all the users' actions in interacting with the app. Furthermore, the user interface of most of them was designed to make uninstallation difficult.
Users should of course uninstall these dangerous apps if they haven't yet, but they should also stay away from nonfree apps in general. All nonfree apps carry a potential risk because there is no easy way of knowing what they really do. Other technical flaws were found as well. Moreover, a previous investigation had found that half of the top 10 gratis VPN apps have lousy privacy policies. The Weather Channel app stored users' locations to the company's server. The company is being sued, demanding that it notify the users of what it will do with the data. We think that lawsuit is about a side issue.
What the company does with the data is a secondary issue. The principal wrong here is that the company gets that data at all. Other weather apps , including Accuweather and WeatherBug, are tracking people's locations. Some of them send Facebook detailed information about the user's activities in the app; others only say that the user is using that app, but that alone is often quite informative. Some Android apps track the phones of users that have deleted them.