No one is unaware that spying on smartphones and taking user-related data is supposed to be very possible, so how do these sophisticated devices spy on their users?
The goal behind spying on smartphones
There are many reasons behind spying on smartphones, some of which do not constitute significant harm, while others carry malicious intentions, and the matter in both cases is not acceptable due to the violation of privacy, and here are some of the reasons:
- Promotion reasons: Once a user searches for a topic using his smartphone, advertisements related to that search start appearing on his phone screen.
- Selling information to third-party companies: Flashlight, for example, was monitoring the websites of its users and selling this information to advertising companies, although this act was immoral.
- Impersonation by stealing passwords, addresses, bank information, etc.: that users keep stored in their devices.
- Reasons for spying directly: There are applications for spying on a smartphone, and the reasons vary, as some parents resort to using these applications to control their children's smart devices such as KidsGuard Pro, XNSPY and others.
Types of applications that enable spying through smart phones
- Social media applications
The most important of these applications is currently Facebook, who was forced to change its privacy policy after the exploit exploited by Cambridge Analytica to collect information about its users, where it is possible to spy on people not only through personal account information and private messages, but sometimes exceeds the limits of Facebook, where many of the requests The sites register with it using a Facebook account, which enables it to track user visits to Facebook, likes, etc., after which advertisements that are compatible with his interests begin to appear, and of course this applies to many other social media.
- Spy applications
These applications allow to see all activities on the smartphone, regardless of their type, from text messages to positioning, phone calls and posts on social media platforms, among others.
- Fake apps
Applications seem legal upon downloading, but after a while, all user information is in the hands of the developer of these applications. This can be avoided by always updating the settings, downloading apps from the official site only and checking how to write the app's name and logo.
This is what happens when you give apps permission to access the camera and microphone
Spying via smartphones will be possible, as the application, upon obtaining the permissions it requested, will be able to do the following:
- Front and back camera access.
- Record what the user does every time the application is on the interface.
- Take pictures and record videos without the user's knowledge.
- Immediately download photos and videos without his knowledge.
- Run an instant face recognition system to monitor the expressions and features of the user's face
- Live broadcast from the camera on the Internet.
- Find out if the user is using the smartphone alone or accompanied by someone else.
- Upload random clips of the video to the user's web service, run a facial recognition system that can find user images on the Internet, and build a 3D model based on the image of his face.
Does spying on smartphones really use the microphone?
Researchers, led by David Choffnes, professor of computer science at Northeastern University, conducted a study to see if spying via smartphones is possible via a microphone, so they researched 17,000 popular apps running on the Android system, and they found no evidence that these apps It has already activated the microphone and leaked audio data.
Chofense explains that this method of espionage is not considered practical because converting speech to text requires very large computer capabilities, and according to this study, researchers found that 9000 applications running on Android were taking screen shots or secretly recording video of smartphone activity and sending it to a third party. In one case, a food ordering application recorded a video of user activity and shared it with a data analysis company, as the screenshots showed a ZIP icon, but the problem would be great if a screenshot of the screen showing the user name, passwords or credit card information was taken.
So, there are better ways than the microphone to spy on smartphones by tracking the site, by nearby cell towers, online guides, or even Facebook thanks to a very small transparent picture file called Facebook Pixel on websites that tracks what the user is watching, and what He reads and what he puts in his shopping cart.
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