Meitu is one of Google Play’s “Sand Hill” apps, part of the company’s accelerator for apps with “viral potential” – take a pic of yourself and Meitu will make you over to look like an anime character, and all they ask in return is every salient fact about you that can be gleaned from your mobile device.
Meitu rolls in a bunch of off-the-self analytics tools that ask for a really wide variety of permissions that are not needed to provide the app’s services: GPS location, cell carrier, wifi connection, SIM card ID, jailbreak status, and personal identifiers for cross-web tracking.
It’s the modern successor to 2014’s privacy invading flashlight apps, which marked the first time that the mainstream began paying attention to the privacy grabs in “free” apps.
