So you’ve clicked “Accept” on the terms of a brand new app. Are you hearing that little voice that asks, “What’s this thing going to do with access to my camera, contacts and location?”
You might just get some answers in new smartphones in 2016 if your phone has the Snapdragon 820 processing chip made by Qualcomm. It will give your phone a built-in capacity to track your apps and tell you when they’re acting strange. The company calls it Smart Protect.
For example, flashlight apps have excessive access to mobile users’ information. Cybersecurity company SnoopWall published a list of the top 10 Android flashlight apps in February, showing they all had the ability to take videos and photographs with your phone’s camera. If you are using your flashlight app, for example, and then closed it, a phone with the Qualcomm’s new processor could watch to see what happens next. If the app started sending out your location and silently taking photos, an alert would flash across your screen.
Many security apps already monitor other apps for bad behavior. Spyware is one. Qualcomm’s experts say the difference is that smart hackers can dupe most security apps, but it’s much harder to fool something that’s running deep in the phone’s processor.
Qualcomm isn’t running the whole show here. It built this capacity into its new processor, but it’s up to either phone manufacturers or antivirus mobile apps to build up a program that uses this capacity. So far, three antivirus companies — AVG, Avast and Lookout — are publicly on board to implement the app monitoring program.
sources: cnet.com; cbsnews.com