By sniffing out the details of network communications, University of New Haven researchers have uncovered a host of data-leakage problems in Instagram, Vine, Nimbuzz, OoVoo, Voxer and several other Android apps.

The problems include storing images and videos in unencrypted form on Web sites, storing chat logs in plaintext on the device, sending passwords in plaintext, and in the case of TextPlus, storing screenshots of app usage that the user didn’t take. Researchers are detailing the findings over five days in videos posted on the university’s Cyber Forensics Research and Education Group’s YouTube channel, starting Monday.

“Security is an afterthought,” said Ibrahim Baggili, director of the university’s Cyber Forensics Research and Education Group and editor in chief of the Journal of Digital Forensics, Security, and Law. People may assume that sending messages, pictures and location maps to friends using the same app is private, but it’s not, he said.

Some of the problems are similar to privacy problems in the Viber text-messaging app that the group detailed earlier this year. There, the service stored image files unencrypted on a publicly available Web server. That’s exactly what’s happening now with Facebook’s Instagram, OoVoo, Grindr, HeyWire and TextPlus, the researchers found. Here are the other problems identified:

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