Forget Epsilon, Fear the Angry Bird | Hacker News Reader

Forget Epsilon, Fear the Angry Bird

threatpost.com

If you read the details on the WSJ site, it doesn't sound nearly as nefarious as the author of this article seems to think. For example, Angry Birds (http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/2010/12/17/angry-birds/):

“User allowed the app to transmit a username/password for the Crystal game network to Crystal; allowed app to see location; and allowed app to search contacts for friends.”

It doesn’t sound as though any of this is happening without the explicit permission of the user.

Analytics packages generally rely on either the application's terms of service or the platform's overarching terms of service, so I wouldn't say 'explicit permission' in all cases. The user likely 'agreed' without reading it.

That said, there's a complete difference between what's actually done with this sort of data and what this guy (or the WSJ) thinks is being done with the data.

In the case of analytics software, things like the phone's location and language settings are used to produce an aggregated breakdown of usage by country, useful for localizing your content and staffing customer support. The phone ID, after being run through a one-way hashing function, is used to provide an aggregated unique user number - since the correlation between downloads and actual active users is pretty weak. There's no user-level records and best practices around data retention are followed.

Oh, the horror.

Agreed. There is also a difference between security conscious people like us giving "explicit permission" and common user (who greatly outnumber us) handing out permissions like they're going out of style.

I installed the firewall app from the Cydia store on my jailbroken iPhone. It is pretty impressive just how many apps want to contact various parties to report would-be irrelevant info on your phone. Assault on privacy indeed.

I did notice that Angry Birds, and offline game, sure wanted to send a lot of data out for no apparent reason.

It seems like there is a new business model reflected by a subset of the app store catalog that just intends to serve as a cheap/free distraction for the user, with the real goal of raiding as much data as possible.

    It seems like there is a new business model reflected by a subset of the app store catalog that just intends to serve as a cheap/free distraction for the user, with the real goal of raiding as much data as possible.

Otherwise known as the facebook app business model.

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