As technology continues to evolve, speed becomes increasingly important.
Software developers are expected to create not only faster and more powerful devices, but also new products and services faster.
These demands have changed the way new apps are created. Most companies now take a modular approach that recycles and reuses code to reduce duplication of effort. This approach allows developers to “plug in” code from other sources, allowing them to quickly and easily connect to third-party services to make their apps more useful.
You can think of this process as being similar to Legos. Each brick is a module of code that developers combine to create entirely new apps. And some of those ready-made bricks come from other companies and programmers.
So what’s the problem?
In general, module development is a great idea for getting new apps to market faster. However, this also means that developers have greater confidence in the security of these third-party modules. Especially since you can’t change or update the code you use.
This lack of transparency can be problematic. If the code contains bugs or security flaws, developers don’t know about it. Even worse, they can replicate the flaw in their own apps, exposing users to hackers and cybercriminals.
Please give an example
This unknown factor can pose not only cybersecurity risks but also privacy concerns in some cases. Facebook provides a number of code modules and APIs to help developers easily connect to their services.
However, these modules typically include tracking code, which allows Facebook to “see” your behavior and add more details to your profile that can be used to sell ads. .
of Metropolitan Police Department decided to implement the Meta Pixel tool to understand the effectiveness of their Facebook job ads. However, the tool was applied to all pages of the website, including online forms used to report sensitive crimes such as sexual assault.
As a result, these crimes and victim details were automatically transferred to Facebook.
This is embarrassing and could also be a breach of privacy and data protection laws. And it highlights the risks facing modern app developers.
What can you do?
Unfortunately, these types of incidents are completely unintentional and the developers have no intention of putting users in harm’s way. But that means app users are completely reliant on developers to understand how to use code modules correctly, and apps are continually tested to identify potential privacy and security risks. It also means being there.
As this problem becomes more common, we can only hope that developers pay more attention to the sources of their code modules and the potential impact of each module.