NoSuchApp for Android highlights apps secretly connecting to tracking sites.... A recently published research paper suggests that many free applications offered on Google Play connect to urls in the background. The team analyzed 2146 free applications in all 25 categories on Google Play based on popularity and recency and discovered that these applications connected to "almost 250,000 unique URLs across 1985 top level domains". The methodology used to analyze these apps was the following: All apps were downloaded and executed on a Samsung Galaxy SIII Mini smartphone running Android 4.1.2. The phone was configured to use a local VPN which the researchers monitored for traffic activity using tcpdump to create a package for each individual application. A series of 10000 automated user interactions with each application simulated use while the app was running. Each packet capture was processed with tshark to extract urls which the team compared against EasyList and EasyPrivacy, two popular lists used by Adblock Plus and other adblocking and anti-tracking extensions and programs. Last but not least, all urls are checked on Virustotal as well. The conclusion is devastating. About 10% of all tested apps connect to more than 500 distinct URLs with the top applications all connecting to more than 1000 distinct URLs each and about 100 top level domains. About 33% of apps don't connect to ad-related sites while the remaining applications connect to an average number of 40 ad urls (some to more than 1000) with Google owned sites at the top. About one quarter of apps communicate with tracking servers. Some connect to more than 800 different trackers.....http://www.ghacks.net/2015/05/03/nosuchapp-for-android-highlights-apps-secretly-connecting-to-tracking-sites/
