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Mysterious Communication Connections by Top 500 Android Apps Have No Effect On User Experience

posted by cmn32480 on Friday November 20 2015, @04:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the stop-spying-on-me dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

MIT researchers have found that much of the data transferred to and from the 500 most popular free applications for Google Android cellphones make little or no difference to the user's experience.

Of those "covert" communications, roughly half appear to be initiated by standard Android analytics packages, which report statistics on usage patterns and program performance and are intended to help developers improve applications.

"The interesting part is that the other 50 percent cannot be attributed to analytics," says Julia Rubin, a postdoc in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who led the new study. "There might be a very good reason for this covert communication. We are not trying to say that it has to be eliminated. We're just saying the user needs to be informed."

The original paper [PDF] came via MIT.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday November 20 2015, @06:58AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Friday November 20 2015, @06:58AM (#265694) Journal

    he argument "well then don't use those things" is not a valid solution because the problem that the original AC refers to is that this has become the norm, and there effectively aren't any alternatives to it unless rolling your own apps.

    It is [a/the only] valid solution as long as your life does not depend on those apps. It's called the "free market". If enough people stop using these kind of apps, and start shedding out money for properly, privacy aware implemented apps, there will be a market for privacy-aware apps, and more such apps will be available.
    Or use an open source system. Chances are people will find ways to provide dummy-interfaces for some of the permissions you want to redraw without the app noticing.

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