A mobile app security firm, appthority, recently presented a report which stated that nearly 3000 mobile apps from Android and iOS are leaking sensitive data which includes business information from 23,000 unsecured firebases. Researchers scanned 2.7 million Android and iOS apps which use the Firebase databases and revealed shocking information about all the apps. As per the report, the researchers have found that around 27,227 Android apps and 1275 iOS apps store their app’s data in Firebase back-end database systems.
3046 of these apps saved data within 2271 unsecured databases which anyone was able to access. 2446 of these apps are on Android while the rest of 600 are on iOS applications. The leaked data includes 2.6 million user IDs and passwords in plain text, 25 million stored GPS locations, 50 thousand in-app financial transaction records, more than 4.5 million social media platform user tokens. Other data which is being leaked includes more than 4 million PHI (Protect Health Information) records which contain private chats and prescription of various patients and users.
These social media sites and mobile applications are proven to be not safe at all. It was recently reported that Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are using dark patterns to trigger people to share their personal data. A Norwegian Consumer Council report which was issued on 27th June showed that some big tech companies are using default settings, dark patterns and features of an interface to force their users and manipulate them to share their private data on these platforms. The report also revealed that Windows 10 is using the same thing to get users data but it is doing this to a lesser extent.