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For years people have suspected apps on their phone are listening to what they say after suddenly seeing ads for things they only spoke of but never searched for.
But, as Gizmodo reports[1], researchers from Northeastern University who analyzed over 17,000 popular Android apps[2] found that none of them activates the microphone and sends out audio without a user prompt.
Of course, that doesn't mean apps aren't secretly listening to you through your phone's mic but if they are, they found no evidence of it.
Over 9,000 of the 17,260 apps in the study have camera and microphone permissions. The researchers used 10 Android phones to look at traffic generated by them when their software interacts with the apps.
They found that some apps are transmitting screen recordings and video recordings of what people are doing in the software.
One of the apps that displays this behavior is goPuff, a food delivery app, which records how the user interacts with the app and sends the data to mobile analytics firm Appsee.
The main problem the researchers see is that it isn't clear to the user that this data is being captured and shared.
The goPuff app uses Appsee's analytics library, which is promoted as a tool for helping developers fix bugs and promises to let developers "[w]atch every user action and understand exactly how they use your app, which