Apps Marketed to US Troops Are Shipping Chinese and Russian Code

A multi-university study of more than 220 mobile apps marketed to US military personnel found that a large portion include third-party SDKs (analytics/advertising) that can collect and share location and behavioral data; some SDKs trace to companies in China, Russia, and other foreign countries. Researchers found 64% of apps contained third-party code, 40% collected or shared more data than disclosed, and roughly 7% included code from nations considered adversarial. The report warns that the data-broker economy and embedded SDKs can reveal troop locations, routines, and facility access, and notes that US Central Command has acknowledged receiving threat reports of adversaries exploiting commercial location data.