Did you ever wonder where the term "killer app came from? At one time it meant an application so ingenious it killed the competition. Today, however with numerous viruses, spyware and malware infecting our gadgets, the term "killer App| could take on a more negative connotation such as "that app just killed my cell phone."
With the advent of the iPhone and android, apps have become as common as texting in today's mobile world. An estimated five billion Apps have been downloaded to iPhones alone. And the Gartner research group says the average smart phone user downloads nine apps a week.
There are more than 225,000 apps in the App Store and Google's Android operating system has more than 80,000. It's a $7 billion market and it's less than three years old.
What you may not be aware of is that App developers track everything you do. They not only know all about you, but they know how you use their apps as well. "So what?" you might say. Well consider this. The app you just installed involves banking. What you thought was a legitimate nifty piece of software is actually something a malicious developer created to gain access to your account details.
John Hering is CEO of a mobile-security company called Lookout. He says Google, Apple and other vendors know which apps you bought, which you use and which you have erased from your phone. Developers and the analytics companies they employ access much more detailed data about how you use the app.
Peter Farago, VP of marketing at analytics firm Flurry, adds that they can see, for example, how often and for how long you played a game and everything you did in it. He says that all this data is invaluable to developers, who use it to improve their apps. They can also use it to build audience profiles in order to help attract ad dollars. Advertisers may be looking for gaming fans, for example, and want to target ads to people who spend lots of time using particular titles"information app developers then share with the middlemen who sell ads.
All the data that's tied to your smartphone gets circulated through a virtual system of companies. Jared Kaprove, former domestic-surveillance counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says there are no rules about what they can do with that data beyond some regulations about when it can be turned over to the government. Moreover, many of these companies have no policies for using and storing your data. That data can easily be stolen or misplaced, which can happen even at large corporations with good data-security practices.
Some developers don't even bother creating any useful content. They sit back and let their users do it for them. It's called crowdsourcing. For example, the app called Yelp offers free restaurant reviews. But their reviews are generated entirely by users of the app.
We're apt to download all kinds of apps without even thinking about security and that's a mistake. Anytime you download something onto your phone, you're taking a risk that it might include malware, spyware or a virus. Anyone of them is harmful. According to Smart Money, one game app hijacked Windows mobile phones and used them to place calls to Somalia, running up hundreds of dollars in phone bills.
Hering says the problem is only getting worse. His December 2009 surveys found there were four pieces of malware for every 100 smartphones. By May of this year that number it had jumped to nine.
For a development firm to be profitable it must get its offerings into Apple's App Store. An estimated two-thirds of all app downloads for smartphones are made from that store. It's easy to use, and consumers feel safe because all apps have been reviewed and checked for malware or spyware.
