From The Washington Post have made a curious discovery, and more than 5,400 content crawlers are sending data from the iPhone. And in some cases, it is very sensitive information such as location and telephone number.
Imagine that it is 5:00 am, supposedly your iPhone should be in sleep mode, without performing any suspicious activity. Guess what? So is. Even if the screen is off and the device is locked, applications still send information as if there were no tomorrow.
And, in addition, the information is sent to companies that you have never heard of. Yes, it sounds very scary. I know. And what is more annoying, Apple could do much more to stop this madness.
The information on your iPhone could be anywhere
Our private information contains all kinds of information about our life, from the voice commands we use to ask Siri for things to the web pages we visit when we think nobody sees us. You could assume that Apple does everything possible to avoid it, in fact recently published a funny commercial spot presuming privacy and ensuring that “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.”
Well, it turns out that the Washington Post’s investigation suggests something else. They have used a monitoring software that gathers all the information of the data that is sent from an iPhone.
Attention.
At 6:25 in the morning a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify the iPhone and send it to a list of other crawlers to connect to it. Wow
Do you think that’s all? Hold on.
At 11:43 a.m. Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms, and other companies had already compiled their due iPhone reports from editor Geoffrey A. Fowler of The Washington Post.
Ah …! And do you know the Yelp app? Your company receives messages that include the IP address of all Apple iPhones … EVERY FIVE MINUTES.
Scary, right?
Other applications that collect data through these damn trackers are Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Weather Channel … even the application of The Washington Post itself.
But there are trackers that take this to the most terrifying.
A crime warning service called Citizen shares information that allows you to identify yourself in violation of your own privacy policy.
In a week, up to 5,400 crawlers were discovered sending information from an iPhone to all parts of the world.
We are talking about the scandalous figure of 1.5 GB of data over a month.
This we are talking about is your data. Your most intimate information Why should I abandon your iPhone and be sent to companies you do not even know? Why do we collect information without knowing what they are going to do with it?
Also See: Facebook has eliminated 2 billion false accounts this year
What can you do to protect your data?
Unfortunately, there is not much we can do until Apple decides to put (even more) limits on the regulations of its App Store. But a developer named Patrick Jackson has created a VPN services application called Privacy Pro (we leave you the download below) that identifies and blocks some crawlers.
[appbox appstore id1057771839]
It’s funny how the trackers usually activate at midnight. It seems as if they are designed to not make a lot of noise, to send our information when we do not realize it. Maybe they are designed like this so they can not interfere with other functions of the operating system. These “encounters” at midnight occur if you have activated the “background updates” functionality, which comes by default in the iOS Settings app.
But other applications, such as DoorDash, a food delivery service, send data directly when you’re using them. When you open the app, you are already sending data to 9 third-party crawlers. And for free, hear. What less to offer a good discount for the food you’re going to order, right?
What do you think about this invasion of privacy? Very Black Mirror everything? We wait for you in the comments!
