Free Android apps scrape personal data, send it to China

Free Android apps scrape personal data, send it to China

Millions have downloaded 'suspicious' wallpaper apps, says mobile security firm

By Gregg Keizer
July 30, 2010 01:36 PM ET

Computerworld - Between one and four million users of Android phones have downloaded wallpaper apps that swipe personal data from the phone and transmit it to a Chinese-owned server, a mobile security firm said today.

According to San Francisco-based Lookout, a large number of free wallpaper apps in the Android Market scrape the phone number; the user-specific subscriber identifier, also know as the IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity); the phone's SIM card's serial number; and the currently-entered voicemail number from the phone.

That information is then transmitted to a server that Internet records show is registered to a resident of Shenzhen, a city in China's Guangdong province, just north of Hong Kong.

Over 80 wallpaper apps created by a pair of developers -- "callmejack" and "IceskYsl@1sters!" -- include code that accesses users' personal data, said Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer and a co-founder of Lookout.

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Australian security experts, consumer advocates and privacy campaigners have sounded the alarm over the hundreds of thousands of free smartphone applications that spy on their users.

Lookout, a smartphone security firm based in San Francisco, scanned nearly 300,000 free applications for Apple's iPhone and phones built around Google's Android software. It found that many of them secretly pull sensitive data off users' phones and ship them off to third parties without notification.

That's a major concern that has been bubbling up in privacy and security circles.

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