McAfee App Alert BETA for Your Android Smartphone or Tablet Available Now

Smartphone adoption has continued to skyrocket and for good reason. You can now talk, e-mail, text, shop, use social media, bank and do thousands of other valuable things through downloadable apps.  How can you make sure your apps “ain’t misbehavin’?”

With the vast amounts of personal and business data now found on user’s mobile phones, mobile security threats are steadily increasing, and attackers are deploying a variety of increasingly sophisticated techniques to take control of your contacts, personal data and money through your mobile device.

Smartphones have a broad threat vector and of particular concern are users downloading and running mobile applications on their phones without any way of determining whether those applications are trustworthy. The only way to fully secure a smartphone or tablet is to protect the device, the data and the apps on the device.

An app’s access permissions can compromise a user’s privacy. According to CPP Research, 24% of consumers store computer or banking passwords on mobile device, 11% store personal identifiable information and 10% store credit card number.  McAfee’s global consumer study found that over 67% of users want to know which apps tracking their personal information.

App Safety

There are some practical things you can do to ensure your apps are safe.  First, you should only download apps from sites you trust and check the ratings to make sure it is widely used and respected.  You should also check to see if its permissions allow the app to behave as advertised. This is where App Alert comes in.  For example, if your chess game app has the ability to transmit your contacts and permission to use your camera, you should think twice before downloading that app. 

McAfee App Alert secures and preserves your privacy by providing intelligence about the apps on your Android device. Apps are individually analyzed and graded to show you how they are able to access, store, and transmit your personal data

Check out the App Alert for Android BETA FREE!
How It Works:
When you Launch Mcafee App Alert, it will scan your downloaded apps and report the following:
-Access to personal data such as contacts, message content, calendar, and photos
-Use of hardware sensors like your microphone, camera, or location mechanism
-Whether or not it can intercept events like calls, messages, and keypresses
-Whether or not the app has the ability to transmit data to or from the device and the type of data connection it may use

When the scan is complete, it assigns a graphical privacy access rating for each app using a proprietary formula developed by McAfee and reports access level detail. In general, apps with universal access to sensitive data, plus the ability to transmit that data, receive the highest privacy access rating.  From there, you may choose to trust or uninstall that app.

Try it out and let us know what you think. Download here.
Or on the Android Market

Note: McAfee App Alert does not check if an app contains malware, like viruses, spyware and more. The parallel use of mobile anti-virus software, which is incorporated in our McAfee Mobile Security solution, is recommended.

Tags: Android, app safety, apps, Mobile, mobile security

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