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

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 JoeMerchant on Friday November 20 2015, @01:42PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday November 20 2015, @01:42PM (#265789)

    If somebody cares enough to snoop in my personal life (to the extent of how I select menu items in my phone app), I must be far more important than I think I am.

    Put another way: what a colossal waste of time this is, unless I'm pissing off somebody with tremendously more resources than I have, and if that's the case - they have much more efficient ways of making my life a living hell.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2015, @09:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2015, @09:22PM (#266641)

    The "if you aren't doing anything wrong" argument is still getting quite a workout I see.