Lookout, an organization who produces the eponymously-named
Lookout app (a free app to help protect your phone from would-be
evil-doers) has come up with some scary data in their App Genome
Project. To quote Lookout, the App Genome Project is the:
World’s largest analysis of mobile applications to provide
insight into what applications are doing and identify potential
mobile threats. Basically, the App Genome Project is
Commissioner Gordon to Lookout’s Batman. The findings are pretty
scary (quoted from Lookout): - 29% of free applications on
Android have the capability to access a user’s location,
compared with 33% of free applications on iPhone - Nearly twice
as many free applications have the capability to access user’s
contact data on iPhone (14%) as compared to Android (8%) - 47%
of free Android apps include third party code, while that number
is 23% on iPhone* They’ve also found a number of security
vulnerabilities, including one that allows apps to see sensitive
device data – for example, Android 2.1 an