Retrievable iPhone Numbers Raise Privacy Issue

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 29, 2009 @08:58AM from the how-about-never-is-never-good-for-you dept.

TechnologyResource writes "When a couple of voicemails didn't show up recently, I thought nothing of it until a friend asked me if I'd gotten his message — people just don't call me that often. But the iPhone is indeed a phone, as some users are reportedly being reminded when they get phone calls from the publishers of a free app they've downloaded from the App Store. The application in question, mogoRoad, is a real-time traffic monitoring application. As invasive and despicable as that sounds, it raises another question: how did the company get hold of the contact information for those users? Mogo claims the details were provided by Apple, but Apple doesn't disclose that information to App Store vendors. French site Mac 4 Ever did some digging (scroll down for the English version) and determined it was possible — even easy — for an app to retrieve the phone number of a unit on which it was installed."

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Re:So by tonywong · 2009-09-29 09:17 · Score: 5, Informative

I'd mod you down for not even bothering to RTFA, but claiming that it didn't say what the calls were about is a bit disingenuous.

From the very first link:
Several commenters on the store say theyâ€(TM)ve received phone calls from the company behind the application after they downloaded the free version, inviting them to shell out money for the full version.