New documents leaked by the informer of the National Spy Agency of the United States (NSA), the well-known Edward Snowden, they have put a note of attention on the main games and applications to smartphones for being an almost inexhaustible source of information for governments. And, apparently, the NSA and its British counterpart, the United Kingdom Communications Headquarters(GCHQ), are collecting all kinds of data from users and their terminals thanks to these tools.
The documents have been published through prestigious media such as The Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica, to whom they have been leaked . They range from internal presentations of the NSA, to action plans. All this showing in detail how information is obtained and what specific data, through applications from all over the world.
According to these media, the NSA and the GCHQ, they would have access to the metadata and information collected by the applications in the field of and marketing. That is, user information and non-direct data that is usually used by agencies to deliver personalized ads or that may be of interest.In this way, spy agencies could have obtained data such as the location of the device, the user's gender, age, marital status, etc. Questions extracted when creating a simple user profile or when managing an application and selecting different questions of interest. But there is more.
Among the publications, the names of applications from social networks such as Facebook have also come to light and Twitter And the fact is that the content published here usually contains a good amount of metadata itself. These are data or information that is stored, for example, in the images when they are taken or published. And it is that smartphones are capable of labeling the place where it was taken, the time and date , For example. The same happens when publishing it, always leaving a trace that can give away the user, but which is useful to carry out functions such as labeling users, places, etc.In a very similar way, the charismatic Google Maps would have also been used, allowing users to know the location and being able to create a mapwith places of interest or visited by any user.
According to the spy agencies, at least according to the NSA, the objective of this espionage or data collection is not focused on the US population, but focuses on studying possible terrorists abroad, since they make high use of these devices to establish contact and organize. However, it is less surprising the use of data from applications such as Angry Birds, which has been downloaded worldwide over 1,700 million times An issue that Rovio, developer of this successful game saga, claims not to know about.
With all this, spy agencies could have complete profiles of millions of users about their location, terminal information, personal data such as age, marital status, etc. But also other more intimate issues such as sexual orientation, educational level, number of children and more
