Privacy threats on Android devices — Big brother is watching you

Using smart phone applications in different areas of human lives has become a most common habit for all the mobile users. Taking photos and publish them online, sending e-mails and scanning QR codes are just a small subset of possibilities for these kinds of applications available on particular application store online. When one wants to install some application on his phone, one has to grant privileges to the application, such as: Internet access, camera access, etc. Granting the privileges can lead to privacy issues that will affect the end user - for example, granting privileges to camera access can turn a user's phone into a video surveillance tool. In this paper security of the Android operating system has been discussed and one example of exploitation of its weaknesses to violate the end user's privacy is given.