How to Check if Your Cell Phone Pictures are Being Monitored?

Our times are all about creating memories and sharing them with the world. Social media outlooks took our lives and twisted them into a picture book, one which we cannot do without.

We play in pictures and videos to document every single move we make. Whether it’s a vacation, a small party or even an office lunch, pictures are a part of the… well… picture, so to speak. And our cell phones are the perfect tool to capture every moment we don’t want to miss.

But lo and behold with a great cell phone camera comes great peril – you are more exposed than ever by offering the world to be able to steal your pictures – some of which you may never want to share – and all this can potentially happen right under your nose.

All one needs is a good spy software for cell phones or an app that acts like a cell phone tracker and that’s enough to make you part of the dust.

But fretting over who can steal your data does nothing more than add worry lines to your face – the best you can do is ensure that your phone stays safe and secure by following a few simple steps.

Watch your Mobile Internet Traffic

Your data plan is pretty much clear cut whenever you sign on to a specific carrier. If you haven’t really used your GPRS for heavy duty surfing but your mobile internet traffic seems to indicate that you’re going way overboard with your usage then there’s a chance that your pictures are making their way out of your phone and into someone else’s hands.

Several spy apps for cell phones are designed to infiltrate a particular phone and then relay data to the installer’s inbox or online account associated with the app. If all you do is check your email and you’re being billed for downloading the titanic then you might have a problem.

Get out of jail free cards

If you were to jailbreak your iPhone or root your Android you’d not just make your warranty void, you’d effectively make sure that your cell phone is open to world of horror when it comes to malware and spyware.

Now if you had played nice and stayed away from messing with bad things that kill your warranty you wouldn’t have to worry about malicious apps stealing your information and data and sending it over to their own servers.

For instance, you could have a “good” camera app that lets you take artistic pictures of you and your girlfriend, and another “evil” app could steal the data collected by the first good app and use it for its own purpose.

In order to check whether this is happening or not pinpoint a new app that you’ve installed which you think is suspicious and then see how much battery your phone is eating. If you have all other apps at standby while one (which is not supposed to eat up much of your battery) is burning holes into your phone’s energy there’s a chance you’ve found your culprit.

What are you okaying?

Application->settings->application->manage applications->click on app  <—— that path should be able to reveal a lot about what you’re allowing an app to do. You have no one to blame but yourself if you’re granting permissions to apps without double checking what they’re for.

Take a better look at the permissions that you’ve granted each app on your phone as well (this is true for pretty much every OS out there). If it’s an app for texting and is accessing your pictures then you’ve found a surefire red flag which should be dealt with.

If you’re hooked to a Blackberry you can also try denying specific apps permission to use the internet, in the event that it tries to upload your pictures or any other data you’ll get a prompt that it’s trying to link to the internet.

Android goes a step ahead from iOS and lets you check which apps are interacting with your phone storage or your SD card storage.