Canary Trap Tool Caught 16 Facebook Apps Recording Personal Emails

Launched by Cornell University academics, the Canary Trap tool reportedly caught 16 Facebook applications misusing data by recording personal emails.

A group of academics from Cornell University (New York) including Shehroze Farooqi, Maaz Musa, Zubair Shafiq, and Fareed Zaffar has founded a great and functional software that detects misuse by third party applications on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The software is actually named as CanaryTrap which is being already used for anlyzing Facebook apps. And as per the researchers have discovered recently, almost 16 Facebook applications are recording user’s personal information like emails, and sharing those to third parties.

During the testing phase, around 1,024 Facebook applications are tested. With the usage of CanaryTrap tool, academics can plant face data to various social media platforms and an see the app’ connection and how the data are positioned by them. And based on the analysis, it revealed that many applications are violating privacy policy and are collecting personal information from users for illicit purposes like spam distribution of data, and more.

The tool has detected 16 Facebook apps red handed as they were collecting unauthorized data and sharing personal emails addresses. Out of those, 9 were clearly found in affiliation with third parties, while 3 of them were found related to spam email campaigns.

TikTok also comments on its clipboard copying findings

In the list of social media platforms, Tiktok is another widely popular network for video sharing over mobile devices. This is developed by Zhang Yiming in 2012 in Beijing, China. However, this platform is now suffering surge in its popularity which also found to be accelerated nowadays.

Since most of the social media platforms are under check, TikTok is also under radar due to privacy based concerns. Based on recent update of this social media app for clipboard data copying, it has been asked to explain the unpermitted data access through the clipboard on mobile devices. According to TikTok officials, the app received an update for iOS devices to improve its anti-spam feature, and the feature is said to require access to clipboard data. Further, the company, also stated that copied data is not shared to any parties, and next upcoming update will also remove the data accessibility.