You are a Jughead if You Believe Facebook Apps can Predict Your True Love.

Fake Facebook apps inspired by Mithoo

Yes, you definitely are stupid if you believe some silly Facebook app can let you find your true love, the meaning of your name, hidden facts about your personality, your crush, your profile visitors, your lifespan, the reason for your death, when you will be married or the most suited profession for you.

If you look into this a bit deeply, even the parrot astrologers, or the hand fortune tellers are more reliable than these silly apps because palmistry, numerology and astrology are accepted sciences. And trust me, none of these silly apps integrate any of these sciences to make predictions.


As we transform ourselves into cyborgs, as our relationships with computers become more and more intimate we all have have a lot of computers all around and they have invaded form our desks onto our face and wrist in the past decade.

There are a lot of apps, be it web apps or native apps which access our personal information constantly and keep uploading it. Be it knowingly or unknowingly, the information we provide to web gives it the superpower to access to the greatest of our personal secrets. If you didn't know, this sleepingtime.org can let you know the sleeping habits of anyone who is active on twitter.

Personal Information is Priceless

Personal information is valuable not only to you but for others too. And that is why security is is a burning topic. And this is the necessity that raised the idea behind the Blackphone. Many viruses, worms and other forms of malware target the personal information.The 'Bladabindi' virus which was recently in news for its mass-attack on India also tries to steal personal information.  This news appeared some time ago about a widely used flashlight app which requested a lot of unnecessary permissions and illegally shared personal data of users. All these are enough to give an idea how precious personal information is.

Some Tracking is Inevitable

Websites and apps can collect a lot of personal data including name, location, e-mail, phone number and much more information about you like shopping habits or search keywords using cookies, IP addresses and web bugs(tiny images) with web 2.0 programming.  Even Google maintains a list of interests of its users based on search results and the websites they visit.

All this is done with the excuse of targeting the user with relevant ads and to determine the interests of online audience for marketing purposes.

And it is better speak of the surveillance done by government agencies like NSA as they tap truckloads of information every minute. You may find this news appeared some months back to be interesting and at the same time shocking too...: Google for pressure cooker and backpacks to invite cops.

The governments and Google fall in the list of trusted sources and we can be assured that the information they collect may not fall into wrong hands. But the big question is: What about others?

Voluntary Information Lending

Keeping off the inevitable side, there are many other places where silly people give off their personal information. As far as smartphones and social networking sites are concerned, they are goldmines for those trade personal information. And that is why these apps are developed.

Apps do not have magical powers to turn a smartphone camera into an X-ray scanner. It is ridiculously illogical for a sound recorder app to request access to read system logs. No one can simply explain the logic behind an app which can tell you the date and time of your death or about the people who visited your profile just because it is against the Facebook guidelines. Moreover, Facebook does not provide any API that can let apps access such information.  They simply display some random number and people seem to share it for no reason, spreading the spam.

If you Google around and do a little bit of research you may also come across people selling information like email IDs phone numbers in bulk.



Spam emails annoy everyone. And this is where they come from. When an android app requests permission to view accounts on the device or when a Facebook app requests to view basic information about your account, it can gain knowledge about your Email-ID. If the app requests access to view  you friends lists, it has access to their information too. And then you end up getting these.

Let go spam. The more the information collected, the easier it becomes for your account to be hacked. In worst case scenarios, your email address can be spoofed and your identity may even be used for antisocial activities.

So, What can be done?

As already mentioned some tracking is inevitable but by following some of the tips many risks can be evaded.

1. Identify Spammy apps: Develop a mature vision to identify and report spammy apps.
2. Understand app permissions: Carefully read and understand app permissions before giving them access. Be extra careful about root access.
3. Stop using Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts login: Don't be lazy and start logging in into every website using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Outlook, Yahoo or any other profile just because they provide an option to do so.
4. Keep personal information out of reach: Visit your Facebook privacy settings and untick each category of information to limit what information about you, your Facebook friends can share with third-party applications.
5. Think thrice before granting access: Before authorising any app or logging in using facebook look at permission requests like this...



Click Okay to Continue.

6. Be vigilant: Search for keyloggers while using unknown computers. Never sign in or transact on unknown or public networks.
7. Search for web bugs: Check by viewing the page source. If you see images called “clear.gif” or find images linking to another site, these are web bugs probably.
8. Test before Install: Always try unknown apps and the ones which you suspect on a clean virtual machine or sandbox like Bluestacks or Genymotion.
9. Switch to a different search engine: While Google provides the best personalised results for any query, a different search engine can do wonders when it comes to piracy. Try DuckDuckGo or Startpage .
10. Spoof IP: Use any IP hiding software, proxy, or applications like Tor Browser.
11. Stop torrenting: Torrent clients always leak your IP. So, download them using services like furk or zbigz.
12. Restrain from unknown browser extensions: Browsers cannot prevent extensions from accessing your data on different websites and recording web history. Use them wisely.

PRO TIP: If any of your contacts are unaware of these, share this with them. ;)