Facebook and Twitter have announced that personal data related to hundreds of users may have been improperly accessed after users logged into third-party Android apps with their social media accounts.

According to a report by CNBC, users of Android apps that made use of a software development kit (SDK) named oneAudience may have unwittingly shared information such as their email addresses, usernames and recent tweets.

CNBC says that amongst the offending Android apps are the photo-editing tools Giant Square and Photofy. Presently there is no indication that iOS users are affected by the issue.

According to an advisory published by Twitter, data extracted from accounts via the use of the oneAudience SDK (which it describes as “malicious”) in a smartphone app could be used to take control of a Twitter account, although it has seen no evidence that this has occurred.

Twitter was keen to emphasise that the “issue is not due to a vulnerability in Twitter’s software, but rather the lack of isolation between SDKs within an application,” and says it will be notifying users of the Twitter for Android app who may have been affected.

Furthermore, Twitter says it has “informed Google and Apple about the malicious SDK so they can take further action if needed.” I presume what they mean by that is that so Google and Apple can kick any offending apps out of their respective app stores.

In response, oneAudience has issued a statement claiming the “data was never intended to be collected, never added to [its] database and never used.”

According to the company, it “proactively” updated its SDK in mid-November so user data could not be collected, and asked developer partners to update to the new version. However, it has now announced it is shutting down the offending SDK.

OneAudience statement

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