Phone apps expose sensitive data

Some of the biggest-name apps--such as Android Mail for Exchange and Hotmail, Foursquare, and Groupon--stored the user's passcode and portions of the information that the user accessed through the app, in clear text on the phone's memory for versions of the apps released around the beginning of 2011.

If a criminal had physical access to your phone, it wouldn't be very hard to find all that data and use it to commit identity theft; even remote access to your phone to harvest cached data is now becoming possible--the increase in mobile malware on Android phones and jailbroken iOS phones means that insecurities are more exploitable than ever.

You put a lot of information on your smartphone, mostly through apps that promise a standard of security and require usernames and passwords to access your personal data, at least on the initial setup of the application. But many of those apps unnecessarily store that information on the phone when they don't have to, and they don't encrypt all of their information when they do have to store the information offline.

Earlier this year, everyone was shocked that iPhones were storing their location data in an unencrypted file on the phone's internal memory. But a history of location data seems like small fry compared with storing a password (considering that most people reuse their passwords for multiple accounts) or credit card numbers, or messages you've sent to your boss on the phone's memory. Because phones are easily stolen, and Android phones especially have seen an increase in malicious apps (currently 2.5 times more common than they were six months ago, according to Lookout Mobile Security), storage of your private details shouldn't be taken lightly.