these 450 applications spy on your actions

After the phishing campaigns that targeted Fnac and Darty customers, it is the turn of Android and iOS users to be potentially victims of surveillance tools. Indeed, IT security researchers atExpressVPN discovered the presence of many trackers within 450 applications available on the Google Play Store and the App Store.

Based on information fromExpressVPN, 44% of the tracking tools contained in these apps come from X-Mode Social, an American company specializing in the collection of location data. This company has already hit the headlines on several occasions, and in particular during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company has, for example, transferred location data with federal agencies to facilitate the monitoring of home quarantine orders.

Read also: Messenger, Signal, WhatsApp – a flaw made it possible to listen to all your conversations

The Muslim Pro case

More serious, in November 2020 the journalists of Vice publish a punchy article. They claim, with supporting evidence, that location data from Muslim Pro, an app dedicated to prayer for people of the Muslim faith, transferred via X-Mode Social to US intelligence agencies. After this controversy, Muslim Pro decided to cease all collaboration with X-Mode Social, while many French and British users have filed a complaint against the American company.

Gold and according to ExpressVPN, there are around ten applications dedicated to Muslim communities among the 450 applications parasitized by X-Mode Social monitoring tools. These apps still have 67 million downloads in total. Then, there are 64 dating applications in the batch. According to the experts at ExpressVPN, the 450 applications concerned accumulate 1.7 billion downloads. Rather consequent.

Google and Apple will have to clean up

Of these 450 applications, 150 are no longer available on the Google Play Store and the App Store. The remaining 305 are indeed. If you want to discover the complete list of these apps, composed in vast majority of popular app clones like “Telegramy” (a pale copy of Telegram), go to this GitHub page.

Anyway, the discovery ofExpressVPN remains amazing. Indeed, Google and Apple had expressly asked the developers concerned to remove the tracking tools provided by X-Mode Social of their respective application, under penalty of seeing it deleted from the Google Play Store and the App Store. Obviously, the threat of the two giants was not enough to motivate some developers to cut the bridges to X-Mode Social. While waiting for the two firms to clean up, we advise you not to install the applications concerned and to uninstall them if some are already present on your device.

Source: Geek’s Journal