Many apps
send personal data without awareness of the user. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) studied 101 popular apps and
discovered that 56 of these apps send the unique identification number of the
phone to companies. And 47 of these apps share the location of the smart phones
with others.
Some apps go
even further and sent information about age, gender and other personal details
of the user to different companies. A striking result of the research is that
iPhone apps seem to send more information than Android apps. It is not exactly
clear why.
Twitter and Facebook
Some app makers,
including Twitter and Facebook, in the U.S. are sued for unauthorized uploading
address book data. Thirteen individuals in Texas have filed suit against the
companies, reports CNET. The Americans want to make a collective
lawsuit. The companies named in the indictment are Path, Twitter, Linkedin, Apple,
Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare. According to the prosecutors, there are billions
of contacts stolen from address lists of tens of millions of owners from mobile
phones.
If this is
true, then there may be sanctions against those companies. In that case this
means that this will be a victory for the privacy of personal information.
To be
continued.
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