Interesting report: 3rd-party mobile apps as a security/privacy risk

[Stomme_poes]

@theArticle

Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that including ads in mobile applications (apps) poses privacy and security risks. In a recent study of 100,000 apps in the official Google Play market, researchers noticed that more than half contained so-called ad libraries. And 297 of the apps included aggressive ad libraries that were enabled to download and run code from remote servers – which raises significant privacy and security concerns.

http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/wms-jiang-app-ads/

I wonder if the new Mac-App-Store-only policy of Mountain Lion has any effect on this, or if scripts from a web browser are exempt.

[ServerStorm]

Hi,

I think someone has to develop a Android and i0S app that can run a sudo user when browsing. You could give the mobile user the option to launch in this mode when mobile browsing thus having a fluff user permission not allowed to access the root file system. The logistics of such a thing I am not clear about if this is even possible?

Thanks it was an interesting article.

Regards,
Steve

[oddz]

Well considering apps can get close to the underlying hardcore of course third party components compiled in the source have access to the very same information. That might be all the more to promote web sites rather than native apps considering web sites are restricted to the browser and can’t get nearly as close to the hardware as actual apps.