A recent study of several thousand applications available for iPhone and the iPad shows how much the users are fooled without knowing what is happening. More precisely, exploiting the system Background App Refresh, Update in the Background of iOS, some developers' applications constantly send information to third-party applications with data about what we do on our phones.
Your phone number, IP address, location, plus phone identification information are secretly sent by various apps to third party companies that we've never heard of. Everything happens in the background, through the system Background App Refresh, and applications like Nike, Spotify, Yelp, Microsoft OneDrive, and many others, transfer this data without us knowing.
Thousands of trackers are included in very popular applications available in the App Store, all of which send data about us to various companies, and all the developers say that these are "bugs". I also say the same about the fact that each tracker sends information to various companies every few minutes, and when all these trackers are gathered, the energy and data consumption is high.
On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 pm, a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 am, another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 am, a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.
Even over 1 GB of data per month can be transferred by these trackers without us knowing, and the developers don't really care about this. Unfortunately, we have become just a commodity for companies that steal everything they can until they are discovered, and then they say that everything is just "a bug", and that things should not have worked like this.
