Researchers at Duke University, Penn State University and Intel Labs have warned a significant number of Android apps transmit personal data without explicitly informing the user.

"The researchers developed a piece of software called TaintDroid that uses dynamic taint analysis to detect and report when applications are sending potentially sensitive information to remote servers," writes Ars Technica's Ryan Paul.

"They used TaintDroid to test 30 popular free Android applications selected at random from the Android market and found that half were sending private information to advertising servers, including the user's location and phone number," Paul writes. "In some cases, they found that applications were relaying GPS coordinates to remote advertising network servers as frequently as every 30 seconds, even when not displaying advertisements."

Click here to read the Ars Technica article.

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