This Flashlight Android App Has Been Secretly And Illegally Sharing Your Personal Data With Advertisers

A popular Android flashlight app has been surreptitiously collecting personal data and sharing it with advertisers. The Federal Trade Commission found that Brightest Flashlight, which has been downloaded over fifty million times and which enjoys nearly a million 5-star ratings in the Google GOOG +1.16% Play Store, deceived users both by sharing location and device identification information with third-parties including advertising networks, and by collecting and sharing data before users were even offered a chance to opt out of information sharing upon installing the app.

“When consumers are given a real, informed choice, they can decide for themselves whether the benefit of a service is worth the information they must share to use it,” Jessica Rich, FTC’s Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection said. “But this flashlight app left them in the dark about how their information was going to be used.”

While Ms. Rich’s witty comment is technically correct, permission-setting requests on smartphones have become so complicated and annoying that most people simply accept them by rote without reading the details. How many people would have just clicked “Install” even if the permission-settings request presented upon installing Brightest Flashlight had stated that the app would gather and share information with third parties? How many of them would even realize what they just authorized?

Education regarding mobile-device security and privacy is clearly a necessity. Additionally, it is time for simplified human-friendly installation warnings. The government requires simple, concise labels for food products, and demands that prospectuses for mutual funds and other financial offerings explain risks in clear formats that can be easily understood even by unsophisticated parties. Why should software be different? A few sentences in clear, non-technical English explaining exactly what an app’s author will do with any data it collects is not an unfair demand to make of parties selling apps