Facebook Android app caught harvesting users contacts

Facebook, the top-ranking free app in Google Play, has taken advantage of Android's weak platform security to collect users phone numbers as soon as the app is installed, highlighting core differences in apple's approach to protecting users' privacy and those of social-advertising firms like Facebook and Google.

The news of Facebook's latest "leak" was outed by Symantec after it analyzed various Android apps using its Norton Mobile Insight tool designed to "discover malicious applications, privacy risks, and potentially intrusive behavior."

Symantec didn't need to dig deep into Google Play to find pay dirt, but its researchers still noted that it "even surprised us when we reviewed the most popular applications exhibiting privacy leaks."

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1 million Android phones in China could have botnet virus

Up to a million smartphones in China running Google's Android operating system may be infected with a trojan virus after their owners downloaded popular apps from Google's marketplace, according to antivirus firm Kingsoft Security.

The virus, Android.Troj.mdk, is believed to lurk in as many as 7,000 applications and, according to security experts, may have found it way onto as many as a million handsets, creating the single largest botnet—a group of computers controlled by a Trojan virus—in China.

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