Do You Have These Two Apps That Are Spying On People?

Over 1.5 million Android users could now be at risk after two apps were discovered to have spyware implemented in them meaning people could be giving away their personal information.

Google have had to act quickly after two of the apps offered on their store were discovered to have the ability to steal and share the personal information of users the Chinese-made apps having now finally been removed from the store, but not everyone’s phones.

Any users that have downloaded either or both File Recovery & Data Recovery and File Manager are being urged to quickly delete these manually off of their devices as they are said to be taking away your personal information.

Android users urged to delete these two apps

It’s said that these apps are capable of taking information such as your contacts, videos, pictures and real-time location of where you and your devices are in the world, which can then be shared with the Chinese government.

There has been a lot of talk in recent months about how Chinese social media apps are being used by the Chinese government to track and see what people are doing as TikTok has been taken to court in the US about how their app is used and if they are sharing personal information with their government.

It was the cybersecurity firm Pradeo that made the groundbreaking discovery in both of the apps mentioned above that will send shivers down the spines of anyone with them downloaded and they have thus reported the malicious apps to Google.

Following the report, Google swiftly worked hard to take them down and remove their ability to be downloaded from their stores, however, this doesn’t mean that they will have instantly removed from your device, you will have to do this yourself.

Google moved quickly to remove apps from the store

The apps are developed by a company called Wang Tom and while they insist no personal data is collected by the apps, Pradeo has revealed that this is not actually true following a much deeper analysis.

If you do have these apps then you should take the following steps to delete them as soon as possible. Simply go into your settings, then select apps to see the full list of ones you have downloaded onto your device and then click which one you wish to remove.