Many iPhone Apps Send Personal Info to Advertisers
Posted on
by
Peter James
Are your favorite iPhone apps sending personal information to advertisers? The Wall Street Journal looked at 101 iPhone and Android apps and found that more than half of them are sending such information to companies without users being aware, and, in many cases, in violation of the terms and conditions of the store selling the app.
The Wall Street Journal found that out of 101 popular apps, 56 sent the smartphone’s UDID (a unique identifier for a phone), 47 sent location information, and 5 sent age, gender or other personal information to developers or advertisers. With this UDID, advertisers or developers can keep track of phones very easily. This functions like a cookie on a web browser, except that it can’t be changed or deleted.
While this test was small, it looked at many popular apps. It was found that “the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.’s Android operating system.” For example:
Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone’s ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies.
Both Apple and Google have conditions that require that users opt in before any such information is harvested, but this does not seem to be working. One developer claimed that he was unaware of any such restrictions, but this simply means that he did not read the developer documentation provided by Apple, where this is clearly spelled out.
The problem, though, is enforcing such rules. Apple claims to test all apps, but, apparently, they haven’t tested these apps, at least not enough to find what data they send. In addition, most of these apps don’t even provide any privacy policy information.
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about such apps. You can’t stop them from connecting to the Internet and sending information, unless you turn off your phone’s data access. And even if you do, it’s highly possible that many apps store such information to send when the phone is on and the apps are activated.