Apps to take your mobile screen shot secretly

Many well-known smart phone apps can send screenshots and videos of your activities to other companies without making your permission. US North-Eastern University (NEU) has claimed it on the basis of its study. These screen shots and videos can have many important information including your username, password and credit card number. Acquiring these information without permission is a violation of privacy, it can lead to other problems too.

For a long time it was feared that the phone secretly records the user's chat. The information passed out is sold to those companies who use it to deliver their advertisement to the people. To test this, researchers from NEU studied the study. There was no evidence to record the chat in research. But information about the phone's actions on the phone is secretly making video and taking screen shots.

In this study, 17 thousand Android phone apps were analyzed. Of these nine thousand apps were found to have the ability to take screen shots. Researchers say that this can be the capability also in other operating system apps with Android. Professor David Chopfans, who was associated with this study, said, "We were looking for a clue and we got many clues, some apps can take a screen shot of passwords, but many people may find it very simple but in many ways it's very dangerous."

Ghost, a foster food delivery app, which was included in the study, made a video of the work being done on mobile phones and sent it to an analytics firm named EPSI. No information was given to the user before taking the screen shot. Both companies, however, claim that there was no wrong motive behind it. Web developers use these information to remove bugs etc. many companies can use it for their own benefit