Have you seen these overly prettified photos of friends or celebrities floating around your social feeds the past few days. An amusing photo filter app called Meitu has caught on and has been making the rounds. There’s just one problem, as reported by Ars Technica, the app does about all you can to steal your data!
On an iPhone it will send back information about what kind of phone you are using and what cellular service you are using. But on an Android phone, the app will steal your calendars, contacts, text messages, files in your phone’s storage, and the IMEI number that helps identify your phone to carriers. The Chinese owner of the Meitu claims in needs this data so that it can get advertisers to pay for the app’s development and that it can’t use more traditional ad networks because of China’s very restrictive internet policies. But do you really want a random company you don’t know tracking your every calendar event and text message?
Some users are just fine with being tracked by ads in order to have a neat app. For everyone else, you might want to consider uninstalling Meitu.