WhisperMonitor To Stop Other Apps From Stealing Personal Information

Smartphone security experts Whisper Systems have released a new app that will let you see how other apps are storing user specific information and will stop such apps from snooping on your data. This app, called WhisperMonitor gives the android users an upper hand in securing their mobiles from malicious software. Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson, the two computer security experts who have founded this company developed this software as a part of the firm’s main product WhisperCore. The app secures the data stored by a user on his android device by encrypting it with a secret key. This software has joined a large group of android protection products that have been launched within a short span of about a month. The main factor behind this spurious growth in the number of such privacy protection apps is the controversial piece of information discovered by the developers last month. According to some security experts, iPhones and Android devices can store location specific user data that can be used by the companies to track the user’s movements and whereabouts thus compromising his privacy. Some of the subscribers got so enraged by this startling fact that they launched a juggernaut of lawsuits against the service providers and the manufacturers.

#-Link-Snipped-#Application developers were quick to cash on this opportunity by creating security software like Little Snitch, a Mac desktop application that intercepts applications attempting to connect to the Internet, and Lookout Mobile Security, which offers a premium version of its Android app that tracks what data apps can access. WhisperMonitor has been created with the aim of notifying the user about the data that is collected, stored or transmitted by the apps running on his/her android device. It also helps you change the settings for such apps with the help of a simple and easy to use interface.

Moxie Marlinspike recently tweeted that the company will soon release app programming interfaces that will help to develop software on top of WhisperCore. The app is at present compatible with only two phones, Nexus One and Nexus S but will be launched for other smartphones as well. The app sounds pretty cool and foolproof but some researchers feel otherwise. They believe that the app is more of a headache for the new users but will be a fantastic app for the experts. An average user may not understand when he should grant access to an app or not. Also, the algorithm of this software will stop location data from being sent, but in the process it might break other applications. It will introduce a number of popups which can make you sick enough to allow every app to access the data or you may even delete the app.

So overall, the app is a good one for those having the technical know-how and patience to monitor their gadget’s activity at a low level because you can install apps that require internet access and then modify the setting to disallow the same to the installed app. However, it’s not for those who are not that much into security. So think twice before installing it.

Source: WhisperMonitor First Dynamic Android Firewall