How do I tell if an Android program is stealing my data?

How do I tell if an Android program is stealing my data?

For example, here’s what I can find out about “Tank Hero”. It has been downloaded more than 250,000 times and gotten 28,000 ratings, mostly very good. The program gets “Full internet access” and “Modify or delete SD card contents”. So it has permission to look through the contents of most of my phone… and upload it to their server. The game maker has listed a website, Clapfoot Games with precious little information. The game is free. There are a lot of programs like this in the Android Marketplace.

When looking for bad things, you can often “follow the money”. If a deal seems too good to be true, it is. If an Android app is free, well, it’s not, you just don’t know it yet. It’s good that I see ads in the Tank Hero game, but that isn’t enough.

On a multitude of online forum posts, people keep saying “Oh don’t worry about it, I haven’t found malware yet.” The problem with that logic is that I see no mechanism for discovering and notifying the public about malware.

I looked at the antivirus programs that are out for the Android and they haven’t gotten good reviews yet.

So what am I to do? How do I tell if an Android program is stealing my data?

2 Comments

  1. daa says:

    Interesting. I was just reading about this today. Check out http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/dwallach/things-overheard-wifi-my-android-smartphone Some people are recommending this app https://www.mylookout.com/ but I haven’t used it myself.

  2. androidboy says:

    Hello, mostly apps and games who steals a data. I heard before the angry birds has a spyware on this who steals data and I think when they got caught they remove this, just be careful in download programs especially the free one, hope it helps. by the way I made a post on this issue just last year see this

    http://www.riseofandroid.com/under-angry-birds-app-for-android-in-the-android-market-is-a-hiding-mobile-virus

Leave a Comment

Do not write "http://" or "https://" in your comment, it will be blocked. It may take a few days for me to manually approve your first comment.