Expedia and Hotels.com recorded your smartphone screens

Several iOS apps make secret recordings from the iPhone users screen. This is done with a tracking system called Glassbox, which is used by, among others, Expedia and hotels.com.

TechCrunch researched various apps that did it. The tracking system is used by many large applications of hotel chains or airlines. With Glassbox the applications can track user behavior. It is done to ‘improve user experience’.

One part of this is ‘session replay’, where a screen shot is made and sent to the underlying servers. App developers can thus see how users behavior patterns in the app. Some data are sent encrypted, but according to TechCrunch this is not always done well and data can still be read by malicious actors in the middle.

According to TechCrunch, virtually no app clearly states that screen shots are being taken.