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Antivirus software provider Bitdefender has had its new Clueful app removed from the App Store.
Apple informed Bitdefender’s product development team of the removal saying it had been taken down due to ‘reasons we are studying’.
The Clueful app enables users to learn which other apps may be ‘behaving unscrupulously’ with their personal data.
During Clueful’s analysis of more than 60,000 iOS apps, the product development team found that:
– 42.5 per cent do not encrypt users’ personal data, even when sending it over public Wi-Fi.
– 41.4 per cent can track a user’s location.
– Almost one in five of the apps analysed can access your entire address book; some even send your information to the cloud without encrypting it.
“While most app developers use this information for legitimate purposes, others might not,” said Bitdefender chief security researcher Catalin Cosoi.
Bitdefender’s Clueful team will continue the development of the app and intends to resubmit it to Apple.
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