A test will shock you! Come and test the privacy risks of your mobile phone

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Nowadays, mobile phone apps are seriously abusing permissions. This is true for regular apps, let alone those niche or even directly malicious apps? This has led to the malicious use of the camera on your phone, secretly taking a photo of you in front of the camera; malicious access to your phone album, uploading your private photos; no matter what we say or do, the smartphone seems to know it.

Mobile phone apps secretly run in the background, using permissions such as recording, taking photos, reading clipboards, and positioning, which really annoys users. Fortunately, there are already mobile phone systems and security apps that will remind users when they detect these abuses of permissions. So does your phone have this function? Let's use an app called "Mobile Privacy Risk Self-Test" to test it.

Follow the public account below and send "Privacy Risk Self-Assessment" to obtain the download address.

How to use the mobile phone privacy risk self-assessment

The mobile phone privacy risk self-test APP is very easy to use. After installation and running, you can see that it currently supports testing of 7 major privacy risk projects.

Figure 1 Mobile phone privacy risk self-assessment homepage

I secretly took a photo of you. Don't give permissions that shouldn't be given.

Let’s first try the “hidden recording” test, which is to test whether the mobile phone system will prompt the user or block the operation if the APP secretly takes photos in the background after obtaining camera permissions.

If your phone system turns a blind eye to this and does not give any prompts, you have to be careful. The editor immediately remembered the benefits of those lifting cameras (it should be noted that if the user does not give camera permissions, it is impossible to take pictures, that is, do not give APP camera permissions randomly)

Figure 2 Covert video test Figure 3 Covert video test

Have you noticed the private information in the clipboard?

Do you often copy and paste text messages on your phone? Some apps will maliciously steal the contents of the clipboard. Not only will they read the clipboard, but they will also write maliciously. Especially when shopping apps are conducting red envelope grabbing activities, you can grab red envelopes directly as soon as you open the shopping app. That's because some apps have already written the promotional code for grabbing red envelopes into your clipboard.

The mobile phone privacy risk self-test APP supports monitoring whether information can be read or written in the clipboard.

Figure 4 Clipboard test Figure 5 Clipboard test

A photo reveals your privacy. Don't let APP steal your photos

Next, there is the exciting photo privacy. When a malicious APP obtains a user's photo, even if it is an ordinary photo, it can obtain a lot of user's private information from it.

For example, in this ordinary photo taken during the editor's test, the shooting time, location, longitude and latitude, equipment, etc. are all clearly visible. (Don't worry, the photos you send via WeChat have been automatically processed by WeChat and do not carry these private information, unless you send the original photo)

Figure 6: Test of reading private information of photos Figure 7: Test of reading private information of photos

There are other tests, which I won't introduce one by one here. You can check them in order to see if your mobile phone system will give you prompts or even block these operations. If not, quickly ask for help.

Related article recommendation: Android apps ask for permissions and secretly delete screenshots? A magical tool to deal with rogue apps

Summarize

You never know until you test it. Once you test it, you will be shocked. It turns out that APPs can do so many things secretly. Do we have to cover the front camera of our mobile phones like someone did? So for non-essential APPs, do not give them camera permissions, just in case.