Worse still, 13 of the apps were judged to be so detrimental to privacy that they scored the lowest possible grade in the team’s security ranking system, due to “questionable coding practices.” Six even contained likely malicious links – putting millions of Android users at risk of having their phones hacked – with the Dr Capsule antivirus cleaner app thought to have as many as three. “However, this was not the case – as only two apps did not contain any trackers.” “Since these apps are closely related to security and privacy, we expected them to set the highest standard possible,” said a spokesperson for the Cybernews research team. The individual installation count for the popular apps began at one million, with some having more than a hundred times that number. Android users might want to think twice before downloading free apps to clean their mobile phones and “protect” them from viruses – because many of them contain data trackers and some even appear to have links to potentially malicious domains, according to the Cybernews research team.Ĭybernews studied the forty highest-ranking cleaning and antivirus apps by installation on the Google Play store, which between them have clocked up more than 918 million downloads as of the time of writing.

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