Dead Men Tell No Tales, but Smart Phones Tell All

Do you have an iPhone or an Android based phone? Wait, don’t tell me, if you installed some third party apps I can probably find out.
According to Lookout Inc., in an article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100728/ap_on_re_us/us_tec_techbit_apps_privacy many of the iPhone and Android apps include spyware. To be fair, Lookout Inc didn’t call it spyware, but that is effectively what it is. Lookout Inc is a mobile phone security company and they claim that after scanning 300,000 smart phone applications they found that many of these applications secretly take data from the phone and send it back to a 3rd party.
There is a significant difference between the iPhone and the Android systems however. Apple wants users to believe that they only allow safe applications on the Apple store, where Android relies upon Google’s ability to remove software without your permission if they deem it unsuitable for any reason.
Either way, Apple’s white listing is showing the fatigue that is inevitable in a non-scalable system and Android is a crapshoot by design. Apple does appear to have the edge where only one out of four applications were found to contain spyware as opposed to half of the Android apps containing spyware. For the technically astute, however, Android has the edge in that it requires you to grant permission to access sensitive resources. For those who are not so technical the (continue reading...)