I know most of you probably have iPhones if you have anything beyond a regular phone but if you could have an Android (Verizon has them) instead then maybe some of your little understood Apps are spying on you (this link is to a long PDF file):
http://appanalysis.org/tdroid10.pdfAbstract
Today’s smartphone operating systems frequently fail
to provide users with adequate control over and visibility
into how third-party applications use their private data.
We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient,
system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis
system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple
sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid provides realtime
analysis by leveraging Android’s virtualized execution
environment. TaintDroid incurs only 14% performance
overhead on a CPU-bound micro-benchmark and imposes
negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications.
Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of
30 popular third-party Android applications, we found
68 instances of potential misuse of users’ private information
across 20 applications. Monitoring sensitive data
with TaintDroid provides informed use of third-party applications
for phone users and valuable input for smartphone
security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving
applications.
Apparently it's possible that some iPhone Apps could be doing this as well. This is more intrusive than the old party lines!
