Many Android Flashlight apps are requesting 77 permissions

Recently, the researchers released relevant reports and analyzed the permission requests issued by the Android flashlight application. The report shows that many of these applications issue permission requests that are not only numerous but also highly unreasonable. Researchers recently released relevant reports and analyzed the permission requests issued by the Android flashlight application. The report shows that the official app store has a total of 937 flashlight applications, which will issue an average of 25 permission requests, and some applications will even issue up to 77 permission requests.

According to statistics, in all flashlight applications, there are 408 applications that issue less than 10 permission requests, which is a reasonable range. However, there are 262 such applications that issue 50 or more permission requests. Researchers say that some applications require far more privileges than they need to run. For example, there are 77 applications that request to record audio, 180 applications that request to read a contact list, and so on. In addition, there is an application called “Flashlight” that issues requests such as kill background processes, place phone calls, handle SMS messages, access geo-location data, or trigger downloads without notifying the user.

Researchers say that although only seven flashlight applications have been identified as malicious programs, unusual application requests too much permissions are not reasonable. Experts suspect that such applications may collect data from user devices and provide them to third parties. Therefore, Android users need to carefully check their permission requests before installing the application.

Via: ZDNet