You've probably seen them everywhere on social media: Selfies of your friends turned into cartoonish portraits.

 

你大概已经在社交媒体上见过了：朋友们的自拍被P成卡通肖像，铺天盖地。

 

Chinese app Meitu -- which has gained popularity in the US within the past two weeks -- adds colorful, caricature-like features, such as bigger eyes, tear drops and accessories like feathers and flowers, to photos.

 

But now the app has now found itself in hot water. It's collecting information about you for advertising¹ purposes.

 

If you have an iPhone, the free app is tracking location and mobile carrier information, your IP address and generates a unique identifier to track you. It also quietly shares Android users' IMEIs, the unique code that identifies individual devices, and sends that data back to servers in China.

 

Meitu asks for some of these permissions -- but not all -- at the time of download.

 

However, security researchers say this method isn't much different than what many apps already do. The process is similar to how you're currently tracked by ads around the web.

 

In this case, Meitu's developers wrote a piece of code into the app, so advertisers could see who is using it and what they're viewing.

 

"Most of the sketchy² things being reported in Meitu are [of] the numerous ad trackers baked into the software, which can generate revenue for the software authors," forensic³ expert Jonathan Zdziarski told CNNTech. "It's a rather widespread problem among mobile apps and not just on any one platform."

 

 

Although Meitu says it doesn't sell user data, other apps that collect similar information might. It's possible to change what type of data you give to apps through "App Permissions" in Settings on Android and in under "Privacy" on iOS.

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