Sneaky, but we’ve a feeling a lot of people will find it useful.
Earlier this week, a District Attorney in Blount County, Tennessee uploaded a video on Facebook, warning parents of a smartphone app that enabled users to hide photos they didn’t want anyone else to see but did so under false pretences.
Does your child have this app– Calculator%? You need to know what this app really is for— and it isn’t for adding numbers! Check out this new video (less than 2 minutes)!
Posted by Blount County District Attorney-41st Judicial Circuit on Tuesday, 1 September 2015
The video, which was shared on Buzzfeed amongst other sites, attracted well over two and a half million views and was shared over 100,000 times, presumably to help sound a warning to parents concerned about the material their children were accessing on their smartphones.
The app, available for iPhone as ‘Calculator%’ but which has many imitators on both iPhone and Android, appears to the naked eye to be nothing but a run-of-the-mill calculator, but a secret code gives access to images and other files that don’t appear anywhere else on the device.
iPhone
Pic via Morgan Shanahan/Buzzfeed
Android
Pic via Amber Dorsey/Buzzfeed
The DA’s video has helped spread the message about the apps to concerned parents worldwide, but at the same time, it will also have alerted others who actually want to use the app for that purpose.
Something tells us there could be some very awkward conversations ahead.
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