In recent updates to some of its android devices, HTC enabled some pretty exhaustive data-logging. The purpose was likely to collect information for statistics or helping users troubleshoot. Now, if you're going to collect this sort of data, you're going to want to keep it locked up considering that users generally don't respond well to their data being leaked. Unfortunately, that's not the case with these new updates. In fact, the data -- all of it -- is pretty trivial for any app to collect.
Trevor Eckhart was the first to find the warning signs, after which he teamed up with Justin Case and Artem Russakovskii of Android Police to try and get to the bottom of the situation. It seems that the situation can be adequately summed up this way: Any app can get information like encoded texts, limited location history, and phone numbers from the call log if it is just given permission to access the Internet.
Read on...
