Pakistani Researchers Uncover Secret Data Sharing By 16 Facebook Apps
Pakistani Researchers Uncover Secret Data Sharing By 16 Facebook Apps A team of Pakistani researchers at the University of Iowa and Lahore University of Management and Sciences (LUMS) has caught as many as 16 Facebook apps secretly sharing user data with third-parties. Using a technique named CanaryTrap in conjunction with Facebook’s ad transparency tool, the study used ‘honeytoken’ emails to install Facebook apps and observe if the inboxes received any unsolicited emails from unknown senders. Honeytokens are fictitious data, tokens, or files that IT experts plant into legitimate databases to track data and detect any malicious activity. If data is stolen or leaked, honey tokens allow administrators to identify who it was stolen from or how it was leaked. In the context of the CanaryTrap study, unique email addresses served as honeytokens using which the academics registered new Facebook accounts. On Facebook’s platform, there are hundreds of thousands of third-party apps that have acc
