Hands up who made a new year’s resolution to be more active? If that means you’ve also downloaded a fitness tracking app, be very careful.
Cyber experts are warning that dodgy developers could be exploiting your health data.
They say that three apps claiming to track and encourage healthy habits are actually serving up advertisements and lies and exploiting good intentions with promises of virtual rewards that can be exchanged for money and online gift cards. Delete them, they say.
A Seven News report says the app developers removed the applications’ functional ability to withdraw payment in a later update, which effectively means that users attempting to earn money using the app will find their balance worthless.
“Apart from being told they can earn these ‘virtual rewards’ by performing fitness tasks, users are also constantly served advertisements and actually encouraged to boost their reward balance by watching them,” the report says.
The deceptive update was detected in three apps including Lucky Habit: health tracker, which has the same command-and-control (C&C) server as fitness apps WalkingJoy and Lucky Step-Walking Tracker.
Together, the apps had been downloaded over 20 million times.
Do you have any fitness apps on your smartphone? Are you sure they’re legitimate?
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