Is your data safe with intelligent apps?

Making the most of historical and real-time datasets, these platforms are empowering the potential for hypotheses made by machines, but should we be wary?

Whether you’ve upgraded to iOS 13 or Android 10, there have been many surprises for mobile users, all of which have promised ‘ease of living’. The past few years of said surprises include improvements within voice assistants such as Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, or something as seemingly basic as your built-in News apps. These encompassing programmes, however, are ‘intelligent apps’.

While the name is fairly self-explanatory, let us get technical in terms of their modus operandi. I-apps, as they are commonly called, harness data based on user behaviour and other sources to make hypotheses and suggestions, ultimately delivering personalised and adaptive user experiences! Such apps are capable of converging database and data warehouse workloads, operating with Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.

The home and quotidian life aren’t the only scopes for such apps; the workplace is too. Especially companies which develop these apps.

In a Medium blog post dated June 20, 2019, by Data Driven Investor, “Today’s digital natives demand much more than [simple mobile-enabled access to key business applications and data], they anticipate intelligent user experience and highly usable as offered by consumer apps. And, intelligent apps assure to provide the same.”

So, what do we trust?

• Here are some warning signs for a concerning i-app. As a user, you can control how these apps operate and use your data… or you can choose to banish them from your smartphone and invest in a ‘brick phone’
• If they want you to only sign in through either Facebook or Google. These should never be the only options for using an app.
• These apps will have a large number of ads, often of the targeted variety. They’ll try to capitalise on your retail inclinations and timings of mobile use.
• They may ask for permissions to many bizarrely irrelevant components on your phone. For example, why should a social media app want access to call logs?

Which apps?

I-apps have been staring at you the whole time. In fact, we wouldn’t say there are apps that haven’t been made into i-apps at some point in their development timelines. For example, health trackers.

Microsoft has Bing Predicts which understands users’ patterns of web usage and even greater web trends and behaviours to get you answers fast, for the many types of questions you have. Bing then claims to verify concrete answers across multiple sources rather than just one. But what about more nuanced questions? Bing provides a carousel of answers gathered from the web, as well as info from the Reddit community.

Then there are i-apps used to precipitate inclusivity. Closer to home, Envision AI is used by the visually impaired to recognise their surroundings, but the Artificial Intelligence components take the notions of assistive technology to higher levels by having the app continually learn and make sense of hand-writing and Indian scripts.

The baddies

Then there is the worry; the lip-gnawing and discomfort-inducing kind which has you considering throwing your phone into the nearest water body. We faced panic across fem-tech users, as Privacy International reported on September 9 how menstruation apps, which collect information about your health, your sexual life, your mood and more, could be sharing deeply personal data with Facebook. “We, therefore, wanted to make sure that they keep this information to themselves, rather than sharing it with other companies… We did a dynamic analysis of the apps using our data interception environment to look at the data that those apps share with Facebook… As we will expose in this report, Maya by Plackal Tech (over 5 million downloads on Google Play) and MIA by Mobapp Development Limited conducted — at the time of the research — what we believe to be extensive sharing of sensitive personal data with third parties, including Facebook.”

This access is claimed to be due to Facebook’s SDK for Android feature, which allows app developers to bind their apps with Facebook’s platform. The feature contains a number of core components, such as analytics, graph API, login and even ads! Given medical data is considered to be the most personally confidential information we can have, many users were horrified by the terrifying side of i-apps.

Then there was the huge craze of FaceApp, which thousands of people used to comically age themselves digitally. Many technologists were concerned with the amount of metadata harvested from users’ phones in a similar way to Maya and MIA.

So, think twice about the pedestalled placement of i-apps. Yes, they have the power to fuel the future and there’s an unavoidable thrill with using many of them, but watch enough episodes of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror , and you have got to wonder if you are just a statistic for the next generation of users.

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