Would you have imagined that a brand-new mobile phone straight from the factory comes with pre-installed spyware?
Most people are aware that their cellphone may have certain vulnerabilities and that they should be careful about the settings they choose, cautious when using the device to send and receive sensitive data and wary about what kind of apps to install.
But Android phones ship with software that has been pre-installed by the smartphone vendor. Some of these apps may be invisible to the user so they can do things that you as a user can hardly detect.
Many of these apps are actually spyware. They spy on their users and gather information using custom permissions, granted by the smartphone vendor or mobile network operator, which enabled them to perform actions that regular applications cannot.
Not only pre-installed applications can harvest geolocation information, personal email, phone call metadata and contacts, but some of them can even turn on your camera or microphone, take pictures and record your conversations without your knowledge.
Some of them may even send out data packages to some remote server at night when you as the owner are sleeping and your smartphone is turned off.
How to get rid of those pre-installed apps?
Although these apps come with the phone and pretend to be a part of it (and sometimes even include the name of the vendor in their name), good antivirus software will know to warn you that there is something suspicious in these apps. It will alert you that the app is spyware or a Trojan and will allow you to check its permissions and remove it.
