Mr Lee Posted December 18, 2010 Posted December 18, 2010 This is a bit troublesome to me, I do not think I will be using an IPhone anytime soon. Does this upset any of you the way it upsets me? Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.An examination of 101 popular smartphone "apps"—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them.Among the apps tested, the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.'s Android operating system. Because of the test's size, it's not known if the pattern holds among the hundreds of thousands of apps available.Apps sharing the most information included TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app for text messaging. It sent the phone's unique ID number to eight ad companies and the phone's zip code, along with the user's age and gender, to two of them.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.The story HERE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Art2ro Posted December 18, 2010 Posted December 18, 2010 (edited) No problems on my wife's 3GS 32 gig iPhone, because she doesn't even know how to use the applications on her cellphone, but it'll be great when she hands me down her iPhone one of these days when I buy her the new iPhone 4! Ouch! Edited December 18, 2010 by Fil/AmArt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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