Is Your Address Book Safe With Sarahah Installed On Your Phone? | TechTree.com

Is Your Address Book Safe With Sarahah Installed On Your Phone?

The app uploads phone numbers and email addresses to its servers, tough it doesn’t disclose that at the time of installation.

 

Over the past few weeks, we have all gone crazy with Sarahah, including myself. It has been an interesting time with Sarahah so far, as people have been able to give honest feedbacks to each other anonymously.

In-fact, the app doesn’t have any ‘reply’ feature that lets you have a conversation with the anonymous sender. Nonetheless, ever since the trend picked up, it looks like sharing screenshots of Sarahah messages on Facebook and giving a comment on that has become pretty common.

However, have you ever wondered if Sarahah brings in any threat or not? Well, it looks like something fishy is going on after all.

A recent report published by ‘The Intercept’ claims that the app is actually more information than just feedback messages. In-fact, it is being said that, the app is collecting and uploading data such as phone numbers and email address from your phone to its servers.

Apparently, Sarahah asks your permission to access contacts during installation, but it does not disclose that the data would be uploaded to its servers. It also looks like the app is not making any functional use of the information collected.

The report published on The Intercept, claims that this behaviour was discovered by a Zachary Julian, a senior security analyst at Bishop Fox, when he installed the app on his Galaxy S5 running Android 5.1.1. It is being said that the analyst used BURP Suite to actually see what data was being sent to remote servers.

While this definitely sounds scary, Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq, the creator of Sarahah, has recently tweeted that this functionality would be removed in a future release, and it was mainly intended for a ‘find your friends’ feature. However, it looks like, due to some technical issues, the feature is not being implemented in the future release.


TAGS: Sarahah

 
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