FaceApp is currently highly questioned in the press. A lot of articles and some American politicians relate that the Russian mobile application collects and exfiltrates its users’ personal data, without specifying which. Real threat or fake news? The FaceApp security analysis performed by the Pradeo Security engine clarifies things. Here is a part of it.
The largest online retailers in the world offer their products through mobile applications that are used by billions of customers. As a result, nowadays 82% of internet users shop online through their mobile device, according to a Statista report.
When a mobile application handles personal and financial data, it is required by data privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Payment Service Directive 2 (PSD2), to embed security capabilities that’ll enforce privacy by design and prevent data breach.
The Pradeo Lab looked into Google Play’s 38 most downloaded shopping apps, shredding them with its app security testing tool. The results show they overly process personal data and handle them in a poorly secure manner.
Updated on June 7th: Following the announcement of these discoveries, the "Peel Smart Remote" mobile application was removed from Google Play.
The Peel Smart Remote app is a widely used Google Play application (100M+ installs) that has often made the news because of its highly intrusive behaviors, such as full screen overlays and untimely advertising, causing poor user experience.
Last week, the Pradeo Security engine alerted its users about severe security issues discovered in the app’s 10.7.3.3 version. It has been found that the application collects and leaks users’ pictures to a server that does not belong to the app publisher. Last Friday, the application was updated on the Google Play store (now version 10.7.4.2), the leaky behavior has been removed from the code but yet no communication was made by the company on this matter. Because applications’ update is not automatic on all Android devices, millions of users running the former version of the app are still currently exposed.
Do you usually install your airline mobile app when traveling? You may think twice before using it for your next vacation.
Our latest study based on the security testing of global top 50 airline mobile applications shed the light on some alarming data privacy concerns. The audit was performed this week by Pradeo Security, an engine designed to reveal mobile apps’ behaviors (data processing) and vulnerabilities. Among the 50 mobile applications tested, had been included the most used ones globally, mainly from North America, Western Europe and Eastern Asia.