Is Your iPhone Spying On You?
12/20/2010 12:49:00 PM - 0 comments
It has been brought to the attention of the media that there are some iPhone apps that are actually spying on people. Did you know that more than half of the programs and games that are made available for smartphones actually send data back to the company once they have been downloaded? This information was discovered by a study that was carried out.
In this study 101 applications were tested and if was found that 56 of these apps actually transmitted the phones individual number to a private company and this is known as the Unique Device Identifier or UDID. 47 of the apps tested actually sent the phone’s location to the private company and 5 of the apps send information such as age, gender and other personal information. All the details were printed in the Daily Mail.
Some of the apps tested include Angry Birds and Shazam. Shazam actually comes pre-installed on the iPhone. This study also reported that there is more private information about users sent via the iPhone than the Android and this is being highlighted especially considering that both companies who produce these phones have promised not to let these practices happen.
This research was carried out in the US but I’m sure it applies worldwide. Research that was carried out by the Wall Street Journal found that smartphone users have no way of stopping this tracking that is happening behind the scenes.
Pandora which is a very popular music app was found to be sending gender, location, age and the phone ID to a string of different advertising networks. I’m sure users didn’t agree to this when they began using this app. If you use the popular game called Paper Toss you are actually giving your phone’s ID number to at least five different advertising companies. There are more than 300,000 apps available in the iTunes App store and if you use them you could be giving out your private information without being aware of it.
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