Category: Apps

Mobile security issue for children identified by recent study

| September 9, 2015

This project has determined that about half of websites and mobile apps share this personal info.

An international project focused on online and mobile security has now released the results of an analysis that it conducted on 1,494 apps and websites around the globe, and they determined that over half are collecting and sharing the personal information of children.

This issue may be very worrisome to parents who are increasingly allowing their children to use mobile apps.

In fact, among the apps and websites that were analyzed by the mobile security project, 67 percent were collecting the personal information of children. Moreover, 50 percent of the analyzed sites and applications were sharing the personal information that they collected from children with other organizations. The project was taken on by the Global Privacy Enforcement Network (GPEN). This analysis was conducted as a part of a broader annual privacy sweep and the numbers that they found with regards to what children were able to share with websites and apps were insightful.

This could represent a major mobile security issue of which parents had been previously unaware.

children mobile securityAmong the key findings of the analysis by the GPEN were the following:

• 71 percent provided no opportunity for parents or children to delete account information
• 67 percent of sites and mobile apps were collecting personal information from kids
• 58 percent presented the opportunity for a child to be redirected to another website
• 32 percent had implemented effective controls to restrict personal information collection from kids
• 50 percent shared with third parties the personal information collected from children
• 24 percent encouraged the involvement of parents
• 23 percent contained features that allowed for the uploading of pictures or videos
• 22 percent presented an opportunity for a child to enter his or her telephone number

The GPEN has opted not to publish the list of sites and apps that were studied in this mobile security analysis. That said, it has been underscored, the majority of sites and apps collect and share this information for the purpose of targeted advertising and not for dubious reasons. Equally, the high importance of teaching children about online and mobile privacy was also stressed.

Mobile technology can detect boredom in users

| September 9, 2015

Researchers have now come up with a way for a smartphone to detect whether its user is bored.

According to researchers from Germany and Spain, it is now possible for a smartphone to be able to detect boredom in its user, which is a capability that has a great deal of potential for a broad spectrum of different uses.

The researchers examined 40 million logs from among 54 mobile device users throughout a span of 2 weeks.

The goal of the researchers who conducted this analysis was to determine whether or not mobile technology had the capability of determining when a device user was engaging with the gadget simply to kill time. By being able to make that determination, the hope was to be able to provide the user with suggestions in order to encourage them to use those idle periods for an activity that will be more useful to them and that will be a better use of that span of time.

There were 35 different mobile technology features that were examined in order to determine boredom.

mobile technology boredom detectionAmong those features was whether or not the smartphone had headphones plugged into it, whether the device was charging, and how long ago the phone received an incoming call. With these types of information, the researchers were able to develop an algorithm that their tests have shown can have an accuracy rate of up to 83 percent in terms of determining whether or not the user is bored.

Apps could be able to use this algorithm in order to encourage the mobile device users to contact their friends, to view a specific video, to include an article in the user’s read-later list, or even to do something that would encourage creativity, reflection, or introspection in the user.

The findings of the researchers were assembled into a paper called “Detecting Boredom from Mobile Phone Usage”, which will be presented this week in Japan at UbiComp. It is very likely that many of the attendees will be able to come up with a number of uses for this type of algorithm above and beyond those that were predicted by the people who developed it in the first place.