Android App Spygate: Tips to Put an End to Spying Apps.

Worried your Android apps are spying on you? You should be, according to a recent study that found several popular Android Apps regularly share your location and critical phone data such as your phone number with advertisers and others. Researchers from Intel Labs, Penn State, and Duke University randomly selected 30 out of 358 popular apps from the Android Market for this study. The computer scientists were able to track each application's behavior using a special monitoring program called TaintDroid developed by the researchers.

Here's a breakdown of the researcher's findings:

-15 popular Android apps sent location information to advertisers without requiring user consent

-9 apps transmitted a user's International Mobile Equipment Identity number, a unique device identifier

-7 out of those 9 apps did not mention IMEI collection in their End User License Agreements including one unnamed popular social networking app and one unnamed location-based search application

-2 applications transmitted a user's phone number and ICC-ID--a SIM card's serial number--both of which are unique identifiers

The researchers did not name which specific apps were behaving irregularly. You can read the entire paper about Android app security here (PDF) and you can find out more about TaintDroid here.

While those findings may sound scary, the good news is I've got 7 tips for you to keep prying eyes off your Android smartphone or your iPhone.

Android Users: Check Your Permissions

You can find a list of what your apps are doing by visiting the Android Market via your mobile device. Go to menu>downloads to see a list of the apps you've downloaded. Then select the app you want to check up on and go to menu>security. This will give you a list of all the information on your device that your application can access. This won't tell you what those apps are doing with that information, but at least you can get rid of any applications that want access to information you're not comfortable sharing with it.

Note that some of Android's sharing and permissions information is a little hard to understand. Many apps, for example, say they have "full Internet access," but the Market doesn't explain what that means. Android's developer documentation isn't much help either, but it appears "full Internet access" means an app has unfettered access to send and receive data.

iPhone Users: Check Your Location

If you're an iPhone user, you don't have the same wide array of permissions you can access through your phone. You can, however, check to see which of your apps are using location information. On your phone navigate to Settings>General>Location Services. This will show you a list of all the apps on your phone that use location information, and ones that have accessed your location in the past 24 hours are marked with an arrow. You can also deny any application access to your location information from this list.