Research: Some Android apps share your data with Facebook without consent

A worrying number of popular Android apps share user data with Facebook without user consent, new research from Privacy International shows (via Financial Times). 

Here’s the worst part: Staying off Facebook doesn’t protect you from this.  

Privacy International, a London-based charity that focuses on improving people’s personal privacy, examined 34 popular Android apps, each installed from 10 to 500 million times, between August and December 2018.

All of these apps share data with Facebook through its SDK (software development kit), which is fine if the users have in some way consented to this. But the organization intercepted data as it was sent (using a freely available, open-source tool) and found that at least 20 of these apps (roughly 61 percent) “automatically transfer data to Facebook the moment a user opens the app.” Read more…

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