Robocall blocking apps accused of spying on you
Consumers trying to fend off obnoxious robocalls, beware: Certain anti-robocall apps on your phone may be sharing your personal data without your consent.
NCC Group security researcher Dan Hastings alleges at least three robocall blocking apps, Hiya, Truecaller and TrapCall shared private data from consumers' devices with third-party analytics companies.
According to Hastings, Hiya and Truecaller shared private information from phones before getting permission, and TrapCall shared information without making consumers aware in its privacy policy.
Fox News Headlines 24/7 anchor Brett Larson told FOX Business Network’s "FBN:AM" that the apps are “socially aware so that if you get a spam call you can say, ‘well, this phone number is a spam call’ and it goes into the database and then everybody knows it’s a spam call.”
But Larson says the issue with these apps is what they are allegedly doing in the background without users’ permission.
“We’re finding is some of these apps are running in the background. So they’re taking your location data, maybe you connected it to your contacts information so now it’s going to be able to go through your contacts and find other people you may know so that all of this stuff is about selling you more advertising,” Larson said.
According to Larson, consumers are left unaware of where there data is sent or how vulnerable it may be to potential data breaches.
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“The problem that we have with all these companies taking our data, we don’t know where this data is going, we don’t know what their security practices are for keeping our data and keeping our data safe and then we have all these massive data breaches,” Larson said.
Hiya denied it has ever shared personal information without permission.
"Once Hiya was alerted to the issue that the researcher pointed out, we updated both our iOS and Android apps so that they no longer pass basic device data at launch. To clarify, we have never sent Personally Identifiable Information without explicit consent, and we do not, nor have we ever sold our users data as outlined in our privacy policy," a spokesperson told FOX Business.