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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 27 2019, @10:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the stop-me-if-you've-heard-this-one dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Twitter and Facebook on Monday claimed some third-party apps quietly collected swathes of personal information from people's accounts without permission.

The antisocial networks blamed the data slurp on what they termed a pair of "malicious" software development kits (SDKs) used by the third-party iOS and Android apps to display ads. Once a user was logged into either service using one of these applications, the embedded SDK could silently access that user's profile and covertly collect information, it is claimed.

[...] [Facebook said] "Security researchers recently notified us about two bad actors, One Audience and Mobiburn, who were paying developers to use malicious software developer kits (SDKs) in a number of apps available in popular app stores," a Facebook spokesperson told The Register.

"After investigating, we removed the apps from our platform for violating our platform policies and issued cease and desist letters against One Audience and Mobiburn. We plan to notify people whose information we believe was likely shared after they had granted these apps permission to access their profile information like name, email and gender. We encourage people to be cautious when choosing which third-party apps are granted access to their social media accounts."

Spokespeople for oneAudience declined to comment. Meanwhile, MobiBurn has issued a public statement on the matter.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 28 2019, @03:15PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday November 28 2019, @03:15PM (#925643) Homepage
    No, I'm saying that at all. I'm saying that there should be finer grained access rights, that's all, it shouldn't be all or nothing. And those rights should be primarily at the behest of the user. I'm not saying it's a good example, as it's implemented terribly, but it's at least an example of restricting visibility of various data - look at the permissions that android apps request.
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