Which Apps Are Nosier About Your Data? Android or iOS?

Mobile applications are equally intrusive and curious about your data or whereabouts, regardless of whether they`re on iOS or the Android mobile operating system, according to data gathered via Bitdefender`s Clueful application.

More than a year ago, we started collecting Android and iOS applications from the Play Store and iTunes to analyze how they behave on the device and what information they leak without users` consent. Each application`s behavior is broken down into clues that offer the user an overview of what the application tries to access, what privileges it requires and how it will handle the data it can access when sending it over the web.

Although iOS and Android have different security models, applications pretty much look for the same thing: personal information that can be monetized by advertisers to sustain the free application distribution model.

Of the most important privacy threats, we discovered that 45.51 percent of analyzed iOS applications have location-tracking capabilities, as opposed to only 34.55% of the Android applications. At the same time, 7.69% of the Android apps can read the contact list, while only 18.92% of applications designed for iOS are technically able to do this. Other privacy intrusions discovered concern the leak of the unique device ID, leak of the phone number and e-mail address, as well as potentially risky behavior by negligence.

The full report is available for download on the Bitdefender website.