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Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing

(newatlas.com)
369 points zeech | 1 comments | 26 Apr 25 00:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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diggernet ◴[26 Apr 25 02:05 UTC] No.43800281[source]▶
> "Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.”

> Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources.

Which permission is that, and how do you detect which apps are doing that and stop them?

replies(6): >>43800465 #>>43800497 #>>43800516 #>>43800613 #>>43800669 #>>43808386 #
1. quicklime ◴[26 Apr 25 02:58 UTC] No.43800516[source]▶
I followed the links to the study they referenced, and it says:

> Unlike the camera and audio APIs, the APIs for taking screenshots and recording video of the screen are not protected by any permission

However they also talk about doing static analysis on 9,100 out of the 17,260 apps, to determine (amongst other things) “whether media APIs are actually referenced in the app’s code”.

They then talk about doing a dynamic analysis to see which apps actually call the APIs (rather than just link to a library that might call it, but the app never calls that function the library).

The soundbite is bad, it shouldn’t say “had potential permissions to take screenshots”, it should just say “had the potential to take screenshots”