Over 60 million people have reportedly fallen victim to a massive recent data-harvesting operation, and these malicious Android apps are at least partly to blame.
Handcent Next SMS-Text with MMSFull Quran MP3 - 50+ Languages & Translation AudioAs you can notice, this is a particularly... eclectic roster of titles you should probably try to avoid using at all costs, including a few incredibly popular Muslim prayer apps, but also fairly generic-sounding QR code readers, weather tools, and messaging services.
Specifically, all the Android apps found to be spying on their users were reportedly deleted from the official Play Store as of March 25, which however didn't stop them from returning at some point between then and the time of this writing.Believe it or not, all of those 11 apps are running free as we speak, although for fairly obvious reasons, we've chosen not to link to their active Google Play listings and we recommend you refrain from downloading them anytime soon.
While Google promises to have verified them as no longer invasive and problematic before relisting them, we feel like it's a matter of principle to look for alternatives with a... superior reputation. More importantly, those who've installed these apps before AppCensus made its discovery and published the conclusions of its research should definitely hit"delete" despite a recent halt of their unauthorized data-collecting behavior.
To be perfectly clear, we're talking about all kinds of sensitive information here, ranging from email addresses to phone numbers, passwords, and perhaps scariest of all, precise GPS location history, which a shady company called Measurement Systems paid presumably big money to harvest via a third-party SDK integrated into the apps listed above.
Unsurprisingly, Measurement Systems denies all wrongdoing allegations, even though the evidence is pretty thorough and quite damning.
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