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iPhone Apps Secretly Harvest Data When They Send You Notifications, Researchers Find


Security researchers say apps including Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, and countless other use notifications as a loophole to skirt privacy protections.

It’s par for the course that apps would find opportunities to sneak in more data collection, but “we were surprised to learn that this practice is widely used,” said Tommy Mysk, who conducted the tests along with Talal Haj Bakry. LinkedIn, for example, uses notifications to gather which timezone you’re in, your display brightness, and what mobile carrier you’re using, as well as a host of other information that seems specifically related to advertising campaigns, Mysk said. Furthermore, a lot of the data that apps are collecting seems unrelated to analyzing how well notifications are working, like your phone’s available disk space or the time since your last reboot, Mysk said.

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