Many popular iPhone apps from airlines, clothing stores and travel sites may be recording your web activity without you knowing.
An investigation has revealed that this data is sent back to app developers but could inadvertently expose extremely sensitive data like credit card and passport details.
Major companies including Air Canada, Hollister and Expedia are secretly monitoring what you do in their apps.
The sensitive data is supposed to be sufficiently masked, or blacked out, to protect it from third parties but experts found that this was not always the case, putting data at risk of getting into the wrong hands.
The investigation, by Zack Whittaker for TechCrunch, found several popular iPhone apps like Abercrombie & Fitch, Hotels.com and Singapore Airlines were also involved.
The companies use Glassbox, a customer experience analytics firm, which lets developers embed 'session replay' technology into their apps.
The company recently tweeted: 'Imagine if your website or mobile app could see exactly what your customers do in real time, and why they did it?'
App developers record the screen and play them back to see what people did in the app to see what people liked, disliked, or if an error occurred.
This means that every tap, button push and keyboard entry is recorded, screenshotted and sent back to the app developers.
But some companies do not effectively mask the session replays when they send them which means that their payment information or passport, visa details can be clearly seen.
The App Analyst, a mobile expert who writes about app on his blog, found that Air Canada did not properly mask the session replays.
This may be the reason for the company's iPhone app data breach which exposed 20,000 profiles last August.
'This gives Air Canada employees — and anyone else capable of accessing the screenshot database — to see unencrypted credit card and password information,' the app analyst told TechCrunch.
The App Analyst looked at a sample of apps that Glassbox listed on its website as customers and 'success stories'.
Using Charles Proxy, a tool used to intercept the data sent from the app, the researcher could examine what data was being transmitted from the device.
The App Analyst found that some apps were not masking the data properly. They also found that none of them said they were recording the user's activity or sending them another company's cloud.
'Since this data is often sent back to Glassbox servers I wouldn't be shocked if they have already had instances of them capturing sensitive banking information and passwords,' he said.
Not every app was leaking masked data and companies like Expedia and Hotels.com were capturing the data but sending it back to a server on their own domain.
The analyst said that the data was 'mostly obfuscated,'meaning masked, but did see in some email addresses and postal codes.
Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch and Singapore Airlines have sent their session replays to Glassbox.
Apple has yet to crackdown on the use of this kind of activity.
The company have recently banned a Facebook 'research app' were they were found to pay people as young as thirteen to monitor their entire web activity.
Mail Online have contacted Glassbox for comment which we did not receive at the time of publication.
The company told Techcrunch that it doesn't enforce its customers to mention its usage in their privacy policy.
'Glassbox has a unique capability to reconstruct the mobile application view in a visual format, which is another view of analytics, Glassbox SDK can interact with our customers native app only and technically cannot break the boundary of the app,' the spokesperson said.
'When the system keyboard covers part of the native app, 'Glassbox does not have access to it,' they said.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
