Investigating Privacy Vulnerabilities in Mobile Devices

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Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Our mobile phones are spying on us, conspiracy?..........................................................................3
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................4
References........................................................................................................................................5

Introduction
The report contains a small discussion on how the mobile devices are spying on the users and its
misuse by the attacker to attack the privacy and sensitive information of the user. The technology
that is adopted by the user for keeping their conversation secured is also adopted by the user but
is observed that these methods do not provide that much protection.

Our mobile phones are spying on us, conspiracy?
As it is known that mobile devices are ubiquitous and is one of the most essential tool for
communication. Nowadays the mobile devices are used not just for phone calls but also for
making use of the internet, watching videos, playing games, watching the news and many more
other purposes. As the technology gets advance, the use of live locations of the user as well as
personal details are asked to the user so that better services are provided to them. This makes the
privacy as well as security of the user vulnerable and insecure. These mobile devices can expose
the user to a new kind of risks in which live location tracking is included. The mobile devices do
not provide much control on the personal desktop or systems as it is not easy to replace the
operating systems in mobile devices and also an investigation on the malware attacks are also not
possible. There are many problems that can be addressed by the use of third-party privacy
software but some are not. Below is the list of different ways through which the mobile devices
can aid surveillance and weaken the privacy of the users (ul Haq and Hassan, 2016).
The first and important spying that the mobile device can do is location tracking. This is the
spying that anyone can do by tracking the live location of the user. This can be done by:
 Mobile signaling tracking tower
 Wi-Fi, as well as Bluetooth, can be used for tracking
 leaking of information from the different application as well as by web browsing
So by all these methods, the attacker can use the weapon of spying through mobile devices. And
the location can easily get tracked by using these methods.
But nowadays the situation is better as the technology has introduced a new method of
encryption that is added in the communication with the mobile methodology for protecting the
users from eavesdropping. But these technologies are not designed properly as they do not
provide that much strong encryption. Therefore, proper dependency on this technology is not
possible with this encryption technology (Terkki et al., 2017).
The safest practice is that assumes that the call that is traditional, as well as various text
messages, are not protected. The detail of the technical components varies significantly from
different places as well as systems. These technical protections are vulnerable and can be easily
bypassed by the attackers. It is more secure to use the communication applications that provide
security by applying the encryption in the voice as well as text messages. This encryption
provides meaningful protection and this protection helps in end-to-end encryption by protecting
the communication and to find the way for undoing the bypass the encryption by the application
developers.

Conclusion
The discussion is made on the spying of the mobile devices and tracking the location of the user
threat that can make a user completely vulnerable and insecure. The solution of the encryption is
also not that much strong. So the mobile devices are resulting in the conspiracy of attacking the
personal details of the users.

References
 Terkki, E., Rao, A. and Tarkoma, S., 2017, January. Spying on Android users through targeted
ads. In 2017 9th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks
(COMSNETS) (pp. 87-94). IEEE.
 ul Haq, S.R. and Hassan, S.I., 2016. Utilizing cellular infrastructure for spying of smart
phones. International Journal of Computer Applications, 975, p.8887.