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posted by martyb on Friday January 05 2018, @03:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-play's-the-thing-where-I'll-capture... dept.

TrendMicro has discovered 36 apps in Google Play that execute unwanted behavior:

These apps posed as useful security tools under the names Security Defender, Security Keeper, Smart Security, Advanced Boost, and more. They also advertised a variety of capabilities: scanning, cleaning junk, saving battery, cooling the CPU, locking apps, as well as message security, WiFi security, and so on.

The apps were actually able to perform these simple tasks, but they also secretly harvested user data, tracked user location, and aggressively pushed advertisements.

The apps in question have been removed from Google Play.

Related: Google Pauses Crackdown on Apps That Use Accessibility Features


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @04:36PM (11 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @04:36PM (#618374)

    The incentives are all wrong.

    Google's incentive is to sell whatever can be sold to consumers, and to get as many advertisements to them as possible. Only insofar as it helps these goals does Google care about consumer happiness.

    You get what you pay for. Start paying for something better.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday January 05 2018, @04:54PM (10 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday January 05 2018, @04:54PM (#618385) Journal

    You get what you pay for. Start paying for something better.

    What's your alternative? I've spent a lot of time looking for decent kids apps for education, and while paid apps are sometimes better with fewer ads and in-app purchases, etc. That's not universally true. I'd gladly pay more ($10, $20, possibly even more per app if it's particularly good with a lot of good features) for something that actually is stable, works well, and has no crap like ads or nagging for in-app crap or other annoyances.

    But I've paid $5 or $10 for crappy things that still nag me about buying more of their crap, and I've had several excellent experiences with free apps.

    So no, in this world, paying more doesn't necessarily guarantee me anything. Do you have a recommended alternative??

    • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @05:20PM (8 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @05:20PM (#618396)

      Seriously. Why are you buying such crap for your kids?

      Buy them paper, and pencils, and books. Do hands-on projects with them.

      Your mind has been warped by "mobile" stuff. Break out of your self-imposed prison.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @05:29PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @05:29PM (#618401)

        Forget the future! Humanity took a wrong turn with the horse and buggy. So began the long slide into slaver and oppression. Free yourself! Charcoal from the fire and stone walls for paper.

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @05:38PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @05:38PM (#618406)

          You people cannot imagine interacting with the world other than through a mobile "device". It's bizarre.

          If your kids are indoors, staring at screens all day, then their eyes won't develop properly, and you'll have to buy them prescription spectacles for the rest of their lives.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @11:36AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @11:36AM (#618714)

            If your kids are indoors, staring at screens all day, then their eyes won't develop properly, and you'll have to buy them prescription spectacles for the rest of their lives.

            Outside of school, I spent most of my childhood wandering in the local woods, hills and moorlands, I'd be up at the crack of dawn and my parents wouldn't see me again until the sun was going down. Now, I've seriously pisspoor eyesight and have had so since my teenage years, long before I ever got my grubby little mitts on my own computer and an account on one of the local college's mainframes.

            I suppose if it isn't genetics, in my case the killer was books..I could read from about the age of 3, by the age of 5 I was working my way through a late Victorian copy of 'The Pickwick Papers' [wikipedia.org] (You can image my surprise and dismay when I finally got to London in my early 20s, my 'geographical references' were over a hundred years out of date) and I have something like 7,000 'real' books in my collection (down from over 10,000), and I'd hate to tell you how many e-books I've got (And let's not get started on electronics datasheets and application notes..)

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @06:15PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @06:15PM (#618421)

          Surely there are other alternatives than 1.) adware malware spyware proprietary user-subjugating crashy shit and 2.) stone knives and bear skins!

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday January 05 2018, @07:06PM (3 children)

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday January 05 2018, @07:06PM (#618439) Journal

        I do all that that stuff. I limit screen time pretty severely, actually. But, like it or not, familiarity with electronic devices and how they work is a standard thing kids learn these days. For that small amount of time I'd prefer to have a kid do something educational rather than playing Candy Crush or Angry Birds or whatever.

        And there are plenty of apps that are good for drilling and repetitive learning tasks, not to mention some truly innovative ones (e.g., Dragonbox, where even a preschool kid can learn the basics of algebraic symbolic manipulation by playing a game about getting a box by itself).

        As for my "mobile prison," I only use my phone as a phone. I generally have mobile data actually turned off. I don't participate in social media. So go be a jerk to someone else, rather than making asinine assumptions.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @07:43PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @07:43PM (#618473)

          It's a fucking tablet or whatever. It's not some great learning experience.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @09:27PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @09:27PM (#618522)

          wait people think $5 and $10 programs are any good?

          i paid $5 for... timekiller mastertronic games for my c64! THere were a few good games from them, but the real good stuff cost 8x as much and came from somebody else! everyone knew the difference between something from origin or EA and something from "$5 special".

          maybe the problem with society is they think they can get good for cheap or free, because every once in a while, it happens. Then they expect it all the time. Give an inch take a mile.

          The problem is that free and cheap pushes the quality companies out of business, because most people won't give their programs a chance because ooh look free is available on the same page.

          what you want to do is overcome human nature and actually make an investment. and if there aren't good investments, I think maybe the google environment isn't the environment you should stay locked in to.

          im not going to tell you to write it yourself. thats not the answer. but choosing an ad delivery platform as an educational one will only teach you how to be a consumer. and you already have said you feel consumed, so consider your options.

          • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday January 06 2018, @06:14AM

            by anubi (2828) on Saturday January 06 2018, @06:14AM (#618647) Journal

            EA games? Commodore 64?

            All I remember is how furious I would get as those bastard programmers kept banging the head of my expensive 1541 disk drive against the stop. Over and over and over.

            And knocking it out of alignment.

            That was one of the main things that got me very interested in reverse engineering and disassembly.

            I knew good and well they were screwing up my drive on purpose.

            To me, they were like that one guy I knew that kept slamming my car door shut way harder than called for... and I really hated to give him a ride anywhere - I did not want that guy anywhere near my car.

            --
            "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @10:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @10:00PM (#618535)

      The alternative is fdroid, where the apps are Free Software. Proprietary software is completely intolerable and far, far, far more likely to abuse you in ways such as what the article describes (besides just not respecting your freedoms).