Applications working as a trojan

Using /e/OS Applications
1

Hello /e/ community !

Is installing a spy app like WhatsApp ruining the privacy of the entire phone ? I know that having Facebook App is like giving your phone unlocked to FB, but did they do the same with WA ?

Cheers,
M.arc

2

Hello and welcome.

WA catch your entire Contacts list, with all info you had added for each contact. I had to use this app so I’d installed it under Shelter, uninstalled it from main profile and created a special short-list of contacts in the Work Profile. The first time, WA needs to be launched into Shelter with this work-profile’s ‘Contacts’ unfreezed.

I needed Skype too (with Shelter) and saw that it seems more invasive… It can catch WP’s Contacts while frozen :pleading_face: So I’d disabled phone-numbers use.

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3

Thanks for your answer @trefix
And about emails, do we compromise the entire phone’s privacy by adding a gmail address to the application Mail ?

4

Hi.

I really don’t know, because I don’t use Gmail… sorry.

5

Hi M.arc,

Since Mail is an open source application, forked from K-9Mail, you can be sure that is not the case. The client will only use standard IMAP protocol to communicate with the servers. Only the content and recipients of your messages using the GMail account would be revealed to Google servers (as well as IP and user agent unless you use a VPN). But the rest should be secure.
You can also install a second mail client in Shelter as suggested above and use that for your GMail account.

Cheers,
Arnau

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