An academic study that analyzed 82,501 apps that were pre-installed on 1,742 Android smartphones sold by 214 vendors concluded that users are woefully unaware of the huge security and privacy-related threats that come from pre-installed applications.

Researchers found that many of these pre-installed apps have access to very intrusive permissions out of the box, collect and send data about users to advertisers, and have security flaws that often remain unmatched.

On top of this, many pre-installed apps (also referred to as bloatware) can't be removed, and also use third-party libraries that secretly collect user data from within benign-looking and innocently-named applications.

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