A security researcher has discovered a serious flaw with the Facebook and Dropbox apps for both Android and iOS that puts all of your sensitive personal data at risk.
Anyone with access to your device can use a free piece of software that’s easily available on the internet to retrieve an unencrypted, plain text file from your device that provides access to your entire account — without requiring a jailbreak.
Last week, we stirred up a maelstrom of controversy when we posted about Girls Around Me, an iOS app that allowed you to locate and view publicly available information on women in any area.
Since we posted the story, over half a million people have come to our site to read about the app, over 65,000 people have shared it on Facebook, and leading publications at home and abroad have followed our lead in reporting on the app, which we described as not just as a potential tool for rapists and stalkers that was putting thousands of women at risk without their knowledge, but a wake-up called about privacy.
Girls Around Me has since been pulled from the iTunes App Store, but considering we were the ones who stirred up so much trouble for the app’s Russian-based developer, i-Free, I thought we would reach out and give them the opportunity to set the record straight. What was i-Free thinking when they released this app? What do they make of the controversy surrounding it? Do they have any regrets? And will Girls Around Me come back?
i-Free’s responses to these questions might prove to be just as controversial as the app itself. The company denies having done anything wrong. They say it is “impossible” to stalk or track someone with their app. They say that the point of the app is just as much about avoiding ugly women on a night out as it is about looking for love. And they’re not sorry.
The official Facebook for iPad app has finally been updated with Retina graphics for Apple’s third-gen iPad. Version 4.1.1 of the app is available now with offline chat mode, photo bug fixes, added language support and stability improvements.
When we broke the story on Friday about Girls Around Me — an iOS app by Russian-based app developer i-Free that allowed users to stalk women in thee neighborhood without those women’s knowledge, right down to their most personal details — Foursquare was quick to respond within hours, cutting off the API access that the app relied upon to function.
Foursquare’s swift response to the issue effectively killed Girls Around Me, and i-Free quickly yanked the app from the App Store in the aftermath until they could figure out a way to restore service. And for a lot of people, the story ended there. The app’s gone. Why keep talking about it?
That’s exactly the way Foursquare (and Facebook) wants things.
Thanks to a great article by our own John Brownlee, we now know how easy it is for apps and people to stalk you using location-sharing services like FourSquare and Facebook. And now the more paranoid among you might be wondering, just how do I turn these things off?
Theoretically, you would have already checked the privacy settings when you signed up. But that’s like reading the manual before you switch on a new gadget: Almost nobody ever does it. So here’s a quick guide to locking down FourSquare, and a rather more involved guide to shutting down Facebook.
“Boy, you sure have a lot of apps on your phone.”
“Well, it’s my job.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Oh, I love Daisy Slots, with so many casino games options, I couldn’t choose. But hey, want to see one to set your skin crawling?”
It was the flush end of a pleasurably hot day — 85 degrees in March — and we were all sipping bitter cocktails out in my friend’s backyard, which was both his smoking room, beer garden, viticetum, opossum parlor and barbecue pit. I was enjoying the warm dusk with a group of six of my best friends, all of whom seemed interested, except for my girlfriend… who immediately grimaced.
“Girls Around Me? Again?” she scolded. “Don’t show them that.”
She turned to our friends, apologetically.
“He’s become obsessed with this app. It’s creepy.”
I sputtered, I nevered, and I denied it, but it was true. I had become obsessed with Girls Around Me, an app that perfectly distills many of the most worrying issues related to social networking, privacy and the rise of the smartphone into a perfect case study that anyone can understand.
It’s an app that can be interpreted many ways. It is as innocent as it is insidious; it is just as likely to be reacted to with laughter as it is with tears; it is as much of a novelty as it has the potential to be used a tool for rapists and stalkers.
And more than anything, it’s a wake-up call about privacy.
Apple introduced Find My Friends ahead of iOS 5 last year. The iOS app allows you to see where your friends and family are located around you. Apple pitched the service as something for a family to use at Disneyland, but honestly, it feels more like a tool for digital stalking.
My colleague John Brownlee highlighted a major issue with Facebook privacy earlier today, so it’s only fitting that we take a look at another app from the same vein. Although you won’t be able to stalk random women with Find My Facebook Friends, you will be able to see your friends on a map. The only difference is that Find My Facebook Friends takes user privacy pretty seriously. If only the app was less buggy.
Do you like the pull-to-refresh feature found in many popular iOS apps? Well, you might want to prepare to see it go the way of the dodo, as Twitter is now trying to patent it.
For years businesses across the world have attempted to dissect Steve Jobs’ career to figure out what made him so incredibly brilliant and successful. Not only did he change the way we use technology, but he changed movies, music, retail shopping and more. His entrepreneur skills were some of the best the world has seen, which is why Fortune magazine declared Steve Jobs “The Greatest Entrepreneur of Our Time” in their ranking of the top 12 entrepreneurs of recent memory.
You and I may hate Facebook, but with almost a billion users, it’s the place where most people put their photos. And now, at least you won’t have to totally slum it if you visit: The customer-hostile social network will now serve hi-res photographs, but not — oddly — to the iPad.
Biologic is a – hmm, what is it exactly? It’s hard to describe. It’s not a Twitter client, although you can see Twitter with it. It’s not a Facebook client either, but your Facebook friends are all here if you want them to be. So what is it? The people who made it say it’s a “playful environment for exploring your friends’ activity streams from your favorite social networks.” Yeah, that covers it.
After unboxing your new iPad and getting it setup, the first thing you should do is open up the App Store and download some essential apps. We’ve compiled a list of 12 of the App Store’s greatest offerings, which we think should be installed on every iPad. These are apps you certainly won’t want to miss.
Have you ever leant your iPad to a friend or family member and when you get it back you find they’ve logged out of all of your social networks and closed all those tabs you were saving for later?
With Skyfire’s new HotSwap feature on the iPad, you can setup different accounts for each users so that everyone has their own profile while browsing the web — with their own bookmarks, tabs, and settings. It’s perfect for sharing.
Camera+, one of the most popular photography apps for the iPhone, has been updated to version 3 today. In addition to a fancy new icon, the update brings a ton of new features including improved photo sharing, focus and exposure locks, workflows, and more. The release also quashes several bugs.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — On Voicefeed is a neat new iPhone app which takes over your voicemail account and turns it into a kind of personalized everything box for your communications. The headline feature is being able to record personalized voicemail greetings for everyone you know, individually or by group. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
Spectacular and a little spooky; Ban.jo, an iOS/Android app that launched last summer, is startling in what it’s able to give the user: the realtime whereabouts of any friends who have location services active for any of (now five) different social media platforms.
Apple wears its love for microblogging social network Twitter on its sleeves. With iOS 5, Twitter became deeply integrated into every iPhone and iPad; with Mountain Lion, Twitter will be a native feature of every Mac.
Given the above, it would be easy to conclude that Apple doesn’t think much of Facebook. However, as Tim Cook made clear to investors at the annual Apple Shareholder’s Meeting today, the truth is more complicated.
We’ve seen countless tributes to Steve Jobs since he passed away on October 5, but the latest is really incredible. It’s a Facebook timeline that documents Steve’s entire life since the day he was born, and it’s truly jaw-dropping. I can’t imagine the effort that must have gone into this.
Just days after confirming its plans for its data center in North Carolina, Apple has confirmed that it is gearing up to build another one in Prineville, Oregon, neighboring rivals like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. The Cupertino company purchased the 160-acre lot for $5.6 million from Crook County.
One of the big marquee features of Mountain Lion is deeply-baked Twitter integration, built right into every Mac apps. If there was any doubt about it after iOS 5, erase it from your mind: after some aborted experiments like Ping, Apple is doubling down on social networking, and the horse they’re backing isn’t Facebook… it’s Twitter.
During the past few weeks, one quote from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography has bounced around the tech and mainstream media. It’s the quote where President Obama asked Jobs about Apple manufacturing jobs that had been shipped oversees and Jobs responds “those jobs aren’t coming back” – words the President decided to ignore during his State of the Union speech last month. Instead, Obama called on tech companies to bring those jobs back.
With all due respect to the White House, it seems pretty likely that those jobs aren’t coming back. Anyone that doubts that needs to reread the first New York Times piece on Apple’s manufacturing partners. The U.S. simply cannot match the manufacturing capacity in China and elsewhere. Get over it. Those jobs are gone but that doesn’t mean Apple and other tech companies aren’t creating new jobs right here at home. In fact, Apple and other tech company have create an entire to category of jobs and filled half a million of them with American workers.
Crytek, the developers behind the Crysis series of games, are said to be in the advance stages of building a new social gaming network called GFACE that will be capable of some pretty amazing things. In addition to the features you’d expect from any social network, such as the ability to communicate with friends and share your experiences, GFACE will boast an impressive game streaming service that allows you to team up with friends and play together from a number of different devices. Think of it as Facebook meets OnLive… only better.
Wunderkit, a new iOS app from 6 Wunderkid, the developers behind the popular Wunderlist task manager, has hit the App Store today, promising to help you organize and accomplish all of life’s projects, however big or small, on your iPhone.
We’ve already shown you how to sync your address book with the Facebook app for iOS to add profile pictures and other credentials, but what if you prefer to use Twitter instead? Well, fortunately for you, you can also sync your address book with Twitter, and it’s incredibly easy thanks to iOS 5’s Twitter integration.
There’s been a lot of ohhing and ahhing about Cobook in the last few days, but spend just a few minutes playing with it and you’re likely to be ohhing and ahhing too. I know I am.
