App-losion!: smartphones and apps are proliferating and getting smarter and smarter. Do they know too much?

• Author: Greenberg, Pam
• Position: PRIVACY

Mobile apps software applications that can be downloaded to your smartphone or tablet--van tell you the weather, give you breaking news, help you keep fit and healthy, guide you to the nearest drug store, find the lowest priced product, or even serve as a flashlight, binoculars, magnifying glass or mirror.

They also can provide businesses and advertisers with information about your age, gender, location, web searches, and your phone number or contacts list, sometimes without you even knowing it.

Many are concerned that all this clandestine sharing of information might not be a good idea. In California, the attorney general is applying a 2003 state privacy law, originally aimed at websites and passed before most mobile apps even existed, to cover apps as well.

"The explosion in the use of mobile devices and the hundreds of thousands of apps for them present a new threat to consumer privacy," says former California Senator Joe Simitian (D), sponsor of the original law. "These apps must be subject to the law in the same way websites are."

400+ Apps a Day

Growth in the mobile apps industry has been explosive. When the Apple App Store opened in July 2008, it offered 800 varieties to download. Today, the "store" has more than 700,000 apps, and they have been downloaded more than 35 billion times. Likewise, the Android Market launched with some 50 apps in October 2008. Known as the Google Play Store now, it offers 675,000 applications and hit 25 billion downloads in September 2012. Gartner, a technology research and advisory company, predicts that, by 2016, mobile app stores will reach 310 billion downloads and $74 billion in revenue.

"The app economy is in its infancy, but is growing at an exponential rate," according to CTIA--the Wireless Association. Its October 2012 study, released with the Application Developers Alliance, found that the apps economy has created 519,000 jobs nationwide and is a significant economic driver for a number of states.

Users in the Dark

The problem for some is that many of these apps collect personal information from unknowing users. The Juniper Networks security company found "a significant number of applications contain permissions and capabilities that could expose sensitive data" or gain access to functions on a device unrelated to the app. The study, which looked at 1.7 million Android apps in 2012, found that free apps were much more likely than purchased ones to access personal information such as the user's...