Check your taint! TaintDroid

[mmarz]

TaintDroid: Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones
This is a system developed by researchers to track how applications are actually using our phones. They found mundane applications were sending out our phone numbers, GPS locations, and other info to advertisers regardless of what the application's access page said.

Tracking how apps use sensitive information required integrating our software into the Android platform at a low level. As a result, it was not possible to implement TaintDroid as a stand-alone app. Instead, to use TaintDroid you must flash a custom-built firmware to your device, similar to a number of popular community-supported Android ROMs.

This is an open source project with lots of documentation, and I think it would be great if one of the rom builders could build a compatible kernel for the Optimus V. I do not know enough to do this myself. Here is a step by step guide to get TaintDroid working on the Nexus One: TaintDroid: Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones

Here is more into on their results on 30 random apps they tested: Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers

Here is there FAQ: TaintDroid: Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones

I was thinking it could be built into a test rom. You back your apps using titanium backup, flash the TaintDroid rom. Restore the apps and see which ones are doing thing you don't want. Then you can restore a nandroid backup and remove the "bad" apps.

Some of these apps might be responsible for poor battery life:

We observed a range of behavior in the studied applications. Some applications shared location with advertisement servers only when displaying ads to the user. Other applications shared location even when the user was not running the application. In some cases, we observed location information being shared as frequently as every 30 seconds.

What do you guys think?

 

[Eollie]

For two bucks you can get this.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.xeudoxus.privacy.blocker&feature=search_result
And it appears to do the same plus fix the perms.

There is a "lite" version also.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.xeudoxus.privacy.inspector

 

[mmarz]

For two bucks you can get this.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.xeudoxus.privacy.blocker&feature=search_result
And it appears to do the same plus fix the perms.

There is a "lite" version also.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.xeudoxus.privacy.inspector

While these are handy tools they are not the same as the TaintDroid. TaintDroid actively monitors your system as you use the apps to see the transfer of information across the network interfaces. It logs what information is sent and by which process. These tools "scan" your installed apps. I'm not sure what they look for but they do not tell you what is being transmitted. Plus, privacy blocker isn't open source. It too could be collecting info on you.

 

[Gutterball]

Check your taint! LMFAO hahahaha

 

[androidsamurai]

+1 for Gutterball... lmao

Privacy blocker works just the same mmarz... except for the the fact that it actually fixes the issues you are speaking of instead of showing real-time data mining...

Sent from my LG Optimus V using tapatalk pro.

 

[Eollie]

While these are handy tools they are not the same as the TaintDroid. TaintDroid actively monitors your system as you use the apps to see the transfer of information across the network interfaces. It logs what information is sent and by which process. These tools "scan" your installed apps. I'm not sure what they look for but they do not tell you what is being transmitted. Plus, privacy blocker isn't open source. It too could be collecting info on you.

Basically what the app does is scans all the applications you have installed. It identifies what data the apps are requesting about your phone and sending. It then will "fix" the privacy issue by replacing that data inside the app with hard coded (bogus) data. So if an app is sending your phone number back to a server, Privacy Blocker will hard code your number as "55544433333". You also have the option to override the default values and make it anything you want.

Xeudoxus is a trusted dev from droidforums, this app had been in the works for a bit. Looks like what he is doing is pretty awesome, I mean its pretty much telling the apps FU use this fake info to report back with.
[Support] Privacy Inspector - Droid Forum - Verizon Droid & the Motorola Droid Forum