ACLU files complaint with FTC over older Android software

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal complaint accusing the nation’s largest wireless carriers of “deceptive” business practices for failing to keep the software on tens of millions of Android smartphones updated — a shortcoming that can make the devices vulnerable to hackers.

Security companies have documented a surge of malicious software targeting Android phones, whose operating systems are made by Google, over the past year. Older phones that do not receive routine updates are particularly exposed, security experts say, yet the wireless carriers who sell most of the phones in the United States have struggled to keep the software current. The problem has caused smartphones featuring Android, which is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, to be more vulnerable to hackers than those of its leading rivals, such as Apple’s iPhone, which receives regular software updates, security experts say. Only one in four Android phones worldwide has the latest generation of the operating system, called Jelly Bean, according to statistics kept by Google, and more than 45 percent run on software first released more than two years ago. Older versions sometimes receive security patches provided by Google, though the process of delivering these to consumers is inconsistent across the dozens of different Android smartphones made by several major manufacturers.