Alert! More than 19,000 apps on Google Play Store could leak your personal data - Check details

More than 19,000 apps on Google Play Store have been found potentially unsafe by Avast, a digital security company, which added that these apps could even leak the user's personal data and put the phone's security at risk.  

The digital security firm said that most apps have vulnerability due to a crucial misconfiguration in the Firebase data due to more than 19,300 Android apps could be exposing the user's data. 

Firebase is a tool that is used by Android developers to store user data. 

Exposed data can include personally identifiable information (PII) collected by the apps, such as names, addresses, location data, and in some cases even passwords, Avast said in a statement. It added, "Avast notified Google of its findings so they could inform app developers to take corrective action."

The apps that could be facing the issue are mostly related to lifestyle, gaming, food delivery and email, among others, the firm said, adding that users in Europe, South-East Asia and Latin America region are likely to have been impacted by it. 

More than 10 percent of 180,300 publicly available Firebase instances were found to be open by researchers at the Avast Threat Labs, which means that apps users' data in those cases have been exposed to the public. 

Each one of these open instances is a data breach event that is waiting to happen and if happened, it can pose critical business, legal and regulatory risks, Malware Researcher Vladimir Martyanov said. 

He explained, “Potentially the personal information of over 10 percent of users of Firebase-based apps could be at risk."