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Comment by throwaway34234 | Hacker News Reader

You are an unethical person. I'm pleasantly surprised Apple shut this down.

I don't even think you should be surprised. I don't see how anyone could condone the privacy violation this app commits.

Of course this app should be banned, should have never made it to the appstore to begin with. And the developer should be ashamed of himself. With all the discussions around the NSA & privacy these days, it's tone-deafness & insensitive for a developer not to see the obvious problems iHasApp creates.

Do you really suppose ad providers in millions of apps do anything differently? Do you think Apple's own iAd relevancy engine that allows them to charge premiums to advertisers does anything differently?

It seems odd to be outraged at a practice employed by the very knight in shining armor that just shut them down.

I share your concern that this functionality could be abused, but disagree with your attempt to treat this as black-and-white or as a matter of personal character.

There are both ethical reasons and unethical reasons why an app-developer would want to know the other apps chosen by their users. On the up side, one could use the knowledge to prioritize improvements/integrations/compatibility with other apps. On the down side, one could punitively react to the presence of competing apps.

Assessing the ethics of how the functionality is used requires greater openness and transparency by everyone. Unfortunately, in a culture as closed as Apple's (eg http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375476,00.asp or https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhyNoiOSVersion ), you are unlikely to see that kind of openness.

I completely agree. This is tantamount to spying on users. It's basically equivalent to some random game reading your entire contacts list and sending it to the company.

I am ignorant of what iHasApp means in terms of users. Much less the ethics of it all. Why is what iHasApp did considered unethical?

From https://github.com/danielamitay/iHasApp:

> The iHasApp iOS Framework allows you to detect installed apps on a user's device. Detection results can be in the form of an array of detected appIds, or an array of appDictionaries from the iTunes Search API.

I'd also bet you a coffee that you could pretty reliably uniquely fingerprint devices this way. I don't bear OP any ill will for writing iHazApp, but I can certainly see why many would be uncomfortable with it.

Very, very skeptical of this. Apps that people have installed tend to be similar apps.

For some subset maybe. But I guarantee you that there is not one other person on Earth that has the same set of apps installed on their phone that I do. The chances of that are astronomically tiny.

Maybe we should make an app where you put in all the apps that you have on your iPhone to find your perfect match. We'll call it appxappxappxappxappxappxappxapp.

You can filter it down even more by reading carrier information which you can access without permissions:

http://iosdevelopertips.com/core-services/carrier-informatio...

I disagree. For a related piece of work, see https://panopticlick.eff.org

I'm running a browser with only two (what I believe are common) add ons installed and a fairly uninteresting system config on common hardware. This is enough (combined with other "safe" metadata) to uniquely identify me! Compare this to iPhones, which frequently have dozens of apps installed and expose comparable device metadata.

Presumably parent is offended by the privacy violation. It allows developer of app A to know I have app B installed, which can be used to target adds etc.

While unlikely, it could be used for worse. Let's say a local or niche publication has an app and can detect if any of its subscribers are also using Grindr, Tinder, or some sort of app that signifies, to them, some cardinal sin on the part of the subscriber. That could be used to blackmail/shame/harass people.

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