The Smartphone is literally the new tool to end all tools. It is present everywhere and is used for just about every possible reason. The little electronic device allows you to get answers to questions you don’t know from search engines, listen to music you like, speak with people you wish to, and play all the games that you could possibly want to.

That means that the smartphone is an inevitable part of your life and stores a lot of personal data. Unfortunately when you decide to use free apps on your smartphone you begin to risk this data. There are plenty of apps that seem to be free and work well, but are in fact leaking out information to their programmers.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology found that most free apps have advertisers that allow them to keep the app free. Unfortunately these advertisement programs use the data on the phone to give you personalized ads. This means that they can predict if you are male or female, what you age demographic is, which part of the country you are in, whether you are married and even what your political inclination is.

Now this information is passed on to the ad generating software and can be tapped into by any hacker worth his salt! Isn’t this diagnosis of the science project conducted really scary?!