You’ve probably seen a Meitu selfie in your Instagram or Facebook feed in the past 24 hours. The app smoothes skin, slims down faces, and even applies a layer of virtual blush and lipgloss, adding a beautifying effect to your photos. And although the app has been popular in China for years — Meitu went public in Hong Kong last month — it only recently caught on with American users.
But security experts quickly pointed out that Meitu, which is free to download in Google Play and the App Store, requires way more data from users’ phones than is necessary for a simple photo app and contains some allegedly sketchy code. To be fair, Meitu isn’t the only app that allows users to download it for free in exchange for their data. But privacy-conscious users might want to think twice about the data they let apps collect.
It’s normal for a photo app to require permission to access a phone’s camera and camera roll, so that it can take pictures or edit ones already on the device. But, as information security researcher Greg Linares notes , the Android version of Meitu wants a lot more than that: the app can access information about what other apps users are running, their precise locations, their unique device identifier numbers (IMSIs), call information, carrier information and wifi connections.
The iOS version is similarly data-hungry, according to forensic expert Jonathan Zdziarski. Although Apple takes steps to block apps from capturing users’ IMSIs, Zdziarski points out that Meitu is grabbing information about your cell carrier and whether or not your iPhone is jailbroken.
