Are Our Animals Leaking Information About Us? Security and Privacy Evaluation of Animal-related Apps

Novel technologies are increasingly being applied to farm and companion animals, and are proving popular with those who keep animals. Although this rapidly growing industry is introducing cybersecurity risks to both animals and their owners, it remains an under-researched field. In this study, we have identified multiple security and privacy vulnerabilities by evaluating 40 popular Android apps for farm and companion animals. We demonstrated that several of these applications are putting their users at risk by exposing their login details. The apps also perform poorly in terms of protecting the users' privacy with over half of the apps communicating with a tracker before the user can consent, violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Accordingly, only 4 of the apps explicitly informed the user of their privacy policy and obtain consent. Our findings are important since they highlight the poor privacy practices present in animal-based applications, as well as the easily preventable security vulnerabilities that were reported to the companies responsible.