Tag: Google

Google removed these 30 apps from Play Store, delete them from your phone now!

These apps have the ability to bombard users with unwanted ads

Google has removed over 30 popular apps, including the ones that add beauty filters to your photos, from the Play Store after these were discovered to have malicious malware. These apps will not be available for download from the Play Store for new users, but the 20 million users who have already downloaded them need to make sure they uninstall the apps from their phones to avoid security mishaps. Among the 30+ apps, it’s the third-party selfie apps that have found to be most fraudulent. As per security researchers WhiteOps, the apps have the ability to bombard users with unwanted ads and redirect them to websites without ever clicking on a link. It should also be noted that in some cases, it was nearly “impossible” for users to delete these apps once downloaded.

Here are the apps, published by WhiteOps, that have been removed from Google Play Store. If you have them installed, get rid of them as soon as possible.

The aforementioned apps have collectively amassed more than 20 million downloads. WhiteOps explained in its websites that these apps render fraudulent advertising in users’ devices. “What these apps all have in common – besides their fraudulent tactics – is their focus on beauty. Most purport to be selfie apps that add beauty filters to users’ pictures, while at the same time showing ads out of context and making it nearly impossible to remove the apps themselves.”

In the time since that first app was published, the fraudsters published a new app every 11 days on average. Notably, most of these apps were available for a duration of around 17 days each before they were pulled down. “But even with an average of less than three weeks of time on the Play Store, the apps found an audience: the average number of installs for the apps we analysed was 565,833,” the research reads.

If you’re wondering how these apps avoid detection in the first place? Well, the White Ops paper notes that most of these apps use “packers” that are hidden in the APK in the form of extra DEX files. “Historically, packing binaries is a common technique malware developers use to avoid being detected by security software like antivirus. Packed files in Android are not new and can’t be assumed to be malicious, as some developers use packing to protect their intellectual property and try to avoid piracy,” the research paper added.

Apart from this, the developers also use Arabic characters, reducing readability for people, in various places of the apps’ source code to avoid detection. “These numbers tell a story of a cat and mouse game, in which the Play Store hunts down the fraudster and keeps them in check by removing fraudulent apps as quickly as they’re discovered. The fraudster likely developed a more robust mechanism to avoid detection and removal. A batch of 15 apps, all published after September 2019, had a much slower removal rate using those new techniques.”

@martin_christopher

Is Incognito Mode Actually Safe?

Google , the tech giant have been accused of gathering data from user’s incognito mode without their permission. A lawsuit of $5 billion  have been filed in  the US District for Northern  district of California. The lawsuit has been filed by Mark C.mao, on behalf of three people based in Los Angeles, Chason Brown, Williams Byatt and Maria Nguyen. According to them , no matter what safety measures consumers take to protect the data privacy, Google still tracks and stores the data of consumer browsing history.

It’s not the first time that lawsuits have been filed against Google, but  this lawsuit dismisses the Federal Wiretap  Act(FWA).According to FWA, user’s are grant the right to sue if their private conversations  are either rapped or intercepted. It restricts the interception of content  which could be any electronic communication , wire or oral  .Under the FWA and California Privacy Act, $5000 is to be granted to each and every individual as a monetary compensation for violation of their privacy.. The user’s have the right to know about what all data is saved ,and what is not.

Let’s Understand the Incognito Mode?

Incognito mode is basically  making  you undercover, by not showing  the websites you’ve searched. Probably, for most of  us believe it’s the best preventive measure to  take. It’s been designed in a manner to remove local data, so that cookies could be either blocked or deleted, and the temporary files could be disabled. According to reports , if someone is using a Windows computer, the browsing history could be found in the computer data. It’s been said that not only the employees, but also the our Internet Service Providers(ISP) could view our browsing history as per their convenience. Incognito mode offers the false impression that the users have retained control about their browsing history.

The complaint argues that Google has been able to track users through Google Analytics ,Google Ad Manager and many more. The complaint talked about the practice of “Intentionally deceiving customers” , by maintaining full control of the customer’s browsing data, and even encouraging them to use and surf , by making them dream of their secured privacy.

Google in their defence to this lawsuit disagreed to this complaint .Jose Castaneda, their spokesperson talked about how the Incognito mode in Chrome gives the right to user’s to not save their data to the website, but added that each time we surf a website, the website might be able to get hold of the browsing information. However, it’s been mentioned in the Chrome help page that the Incognito doesn’t prevent location and action from being watched by the website. It’s been claimed that around 70 % of the users use Incognito mode, through this the Google receives the information like the user’s IP address , what user is viewing , details about what  they watched  and even details about the user’s hardware.

Two years back, researcher from Tennessee had come to the conclusion that the incognito data is collected with user-anonymous identifiers. Google has the ability to link the information with user identified credentials stored in the user’s Google Account.