If you use an iPhone, and you just so happen to plan your itinerary through travels apps such as Hotels.com, Expedia, or Singapore Airlines’ own app, you might want to hold off on doing for now. As a recent online report discovered several of the companies behind those apps may have been secretly recording your displays without your permission.
The discovery was first made by TechCrunch, who also pointed out that several these popular iPhones apps include hoteliers, travel sites, airline carriers, and mobile phone carriers. All of whom are actively recording your personal details covertly.
Specific apps such as the aforementioned Singapore Airlines and Hotels.com have apparently been collecting user data through the hiring of a data analytics firm known as Glassbox. Who then proceeded to embed its own data and display recording technology into the respective mobile apps.
This is worrying, because some of these apps contain fields where users must input sensitive information such as passport and credit card numbers, along with other types of personal information. Worst still, many of this travel and retail apps that was embedded with Glassbox’s technology had disclosed in their privacy policy that such an intrusive app was even put in place.
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One particular app belonging to Air Canada had suffered a major data breach, when it was discovered the airline carrier was not masking its consumer data properly whenever the Glassbox program sent details from mobile devices to its client’s servers. All in all, the data breach affected 20000 users and their data.
This isn’t the first time that several companies have been caught collecting the personal data of its customers in secret, and quite possibly using for their own benefit or even selling them to the highest bidder. Last year, Facebook came under the spotlight of the US government because of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
Nearing the end of last year, the social network was then caught sharing its users’ profile data to bigwig brands that include Netflix, Spotify, and Microsoft, to name a few. Then, as if to add insult to injury, an earlier report on the social media platform by TechCrunch showed the world that it was paying several individuals a monthly fee. Provided they would allow Facebook to install a backdoor app on to their devices, and give their complete access to their daily routine.
(Source: TechCrunch via The Verge)
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