Is your iPhone safe? The 4th App may leak privacy

According to foreign media reports, anti-virus software expert Bitdefender recently found that nearly 19% of iOS apps will access the user's address book without the user's knowledge or consent. In addition, 41% of applications track users' geographical locations. Most reassuring is that 40% of the applications that can obtain user privacy information do not encrypt the information.

However, this situation will be improved by the release of iOS 6 this fall.

It is reported that Bitdefender has studied more than 65000 iOS apps that can be downloaded from the Apple APP Store. They found that 18.6% of applications access the user's address book without the user's consent, and even do not notify the user of such operations. In addition, 41% of applications track users' whereabouts without the user's permission.

In addition, after the information is obtained by application developers, only 57.5% of developers encrypt the data for various reasons. This means that the remaining 42.5% of developers do not encrypt user data at all, which gives hackers the opportunity to attack.

Catalin Cosoi, chief security researcher at Bitdefender, says these statistics are worrying:

It is rare for iOS apps to encrypt users' private data, and geographic location tracking is so common. If you do not want to know what the application actually accesses, it is very difficult to ensure data security.

We are very worried about user data encryption, general geographic location tracking, improper access to address book, and so on,

However, the appearance of iOS 6 will change all of this. Apple will integrate new privacy protection features in the new firmware to solve the aforementioned problems.

When a user uses an iOS app for the first time, iOS 6 will ask the user if they want to allow the app to access their own address book, Track location information, or even use a camera. In this way, the user will know what data the application will access and perform operations according to the user's wishes.

However, the problem of data encryption may not be solved. Because you cannot determine that the application encrypts some data after it obtains it. Unfortunately, unless Apple forces developers to do so, we will not be able to know which applications encrypt our data, but which are not.