• elbowgrease@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I’ve always had a niggling worry that downloading apps from 3rd party app stores came with a higher risk of getting apps with viruses and spyware.

    any truth to this?

    • MrSqueezles@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Even small companies have to deal with, “supply chain”, attacks, criminals putting code into open source repositories to steal data and get access to servers. App stores are major targets too.

      There have been weather apps that need your location to show you weather and oops we also send your location history to our data center in China and sell that data.

      There have been, “document scanner”, apps that help you take pictures of things like credit card statements and did we not mention we send those images to Russian servers?

      Do use a major brand phone like Samsung, keep your OS up to date, and don’t expose private info to these apps or give them special privileges, especially, “accessibility”, or, “screen reader”, and you should be okay.