Slashdot Mirror
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."
As a side note, most of us probably think that "real-time traffic monitoring application" refers to internet traffic.
Obviously this is OT, but ... wouldn't the context of an iPhone imply road traffic monitoring not network? hehe.
This is a real-life example of how the Android permission model is pretty well thought-out. Any time you install an app from the Market, you're presented with a list of all the hardware and software resources that it utilizes. Installing a tip calculator? When you see that it needs permission to read/write contact data, access your location and have full internet access, some giant red flags should go up. True, you can't tell what exactly the app is actually doing with those powers you've granted it, but it definitely helps highlight potential shenanigans. An Android-style system could have helped identify this app as a potential privacy risk. What, exactly, does a real-time traffic app need my contact info for?