Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has released an article warning consumers of ‘Stalking’ apps. These apps are stalkerware or spyware that can track your activity through your smart phone. These apps can share all your sensitive information and typed text with a remote server. Shared information can be photos, videos, audio, camera, GPS location, stored files, browsed websites, text messages, and data of other apps. Some legitimate app companies sell these apps to parents to monitor their children’s phone but these apps are also used for spying on adults.
An infected phone can have the following symptoms:
- Phones battery drains faster
- Phone does not turn off easily
- Bill shows unexplained charges
- Phone is in jailbroken mode
If you are experiencing any of the above symptoms, you may want to do the following:
- Check if your phone is jailbroken – Use root checker app for doing so.
- If you have been a victim of domestic violence or you think that your phone has such apps than talk to your local law enforcement agent.
- Reset your phone to factory defaults – This will fix all the issues, however you’ll loose your data. So before resetting, migrate all your data to a safe location and ensure that you’ll not lose anything important.
- Buy a new phone but make sure that you don’t copy any apps from your old phone or you don’t restore backup of old phone to the new phone.
CDSBureau also warns not to install unnecessary apps on your phone, because all these apps collect your data and ensure that you agree with their data collection. In an open app market place, many apps can compromise your phone and send unwanted data to hackers. Also, don’t allow any app to keep using system resources when not running.
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