A study found that some popular apps on the Google Play store collude with each other to steal information from you.

According to New Scientist, while Google Play store can prevent malware apps from being listed, it can only do much when it comes to preventing colluding apps. These are apps that once downloaded, they can communicate with each other without the user's knowledge and obtain access to information that they shouldn't be able to.

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"We've suspected that collusion happens between apps for a while, but it's hard to catch. So we analyzed a huge number of pairs of apps," says Daphne Yao at Virginia Tech.

Based on their analysis, out of over 100,206 most popular Android apps, around 23% are colluding pairs. However, all of these pairs contained one of just 54 apps that instigated the collusion.

The study also found that apps that were most likely to conspire against you are oftentimes the seemingly harmless such as apps that give you extra emojis, personalize your ringtone, or modify your phone's background. 

The findings of the study will be presented in the upcoming Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

"The bad news is that we found that apps can pass information around recklessly. The good news is that the amount of collusion is still quite low," said Yao.

It remains unclear, however, whether an app was particularly designed to collude with others for malicious purposes, or only a result of an error.

According to InfoWorld, Google Play Store could be a potential source of security risks itself. Contributor Bob Violino wrote that the digital platform for Android apps has a higher percentage of apps that contain malware, or social engineering to connect to malware, than any other app store by an order of magnitude.