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Retrievable iPhone Numbers Raise Privacy Issue
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."
The Ars Technica article linked in the OP says that this applies to jailbroken iPhones.
It doesn't say it applies to only jailbroken iPhones, it says it's easy to see with a jailbroken iPhone (since you can find the directory then)
Both jailbroken and non-jailbroken can access it tho.
This kind of investigative journalism? The kind that puts confusing and irrelevant babble about phonecalls from friends at the start of the article? I'd hope those chances are pretty low.
It's more akin to a PC apps getting your e-mail address and sending you spam.
With an IP address, there's not a lot of thing a publisher could do, except if it want to build a botnet.
If Apple really did care about your privacy then the functionality just would not exist, and at best it would be a hack. As it stands it's just an undocumented feature.
It's great to rely on 'developer integrity' and all ya' know, but those developers are motivated by a need to generate a return. It's hard for anyone to expect a management team *not* to instruct a development team to extract said information and feed it into a marketing team. I've got two ideas for iPhone applications iWantYourMoney and iWantYourInformation supported by the iPwned you framework.
Seriously people it's like putting a 9 year old in front of a big red button with a sign under it saying 'Do not press this button' and saying to the kid 'Don't touch that button kid'. I'd expect the management teams to be saying 'what other user information can you extract'.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I guess some people are just so frugal and introverted that any use of their time or minutes results in a temper tantrum, like some arrogant teenager when the unwashed have the audacity to talk to them.
And you'd be right in a tiny fraction of the population's cases. For the majority, however, a better guess would be that were they asked to provide their iPhone number to the vendor, they would have declined to do so. However since they were not asked and the app took the number any way, they were understandably aggravated.
It isn't the phone call that is important at all. It is the power to decide, and with whom that power ultimately rests.
And if you genuinely cannot see that, I can only hope you do not live in the same democracy that I do...
Seems to me there's a difference between your phone number being available for an app (i.e. for the customer's convenience) and the app passing it on to any third party.
A more honest approach would be some kind of opt-in if it has to be done at all.