iPhone and Android Apps Are Spying On You

As part of its investigation into privacy issues on the Internet, the Wall Street Journal recently disclosed that many of the most popular iPhone and Android applications are secretly spying on you.

These phones don’t keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

WSJ reporters Scott Thurm and Yukari Iwatani Kane wrote that many apps “don’t have privacy policies and there isn’t much you can do about it.”

“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.

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.”

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