Privacy Concerns With Android and iPhone Apps

carre4 writes "The Wall Street Journal has come out with an article where they examine 101 popular smartphone apps and show that 56 of them transmit various types of information including unique phone IDs, age, gender, postal codes, and location to ad companies. The article also includes responses from infringing app makers and talks about the pressure that some developers feel to share even more information, like Max Binshtok, creator of the DailyHoroscope for Android, who has been encouraged by ad-network executives to transmit users' locations."

Comments

duh

[melikamp]

Closed source = no expectation of security + no expectation of privacy + expectation of malice + higher development cost. The sooner Joe Q. Public gets this consumer advocacy message, the better off he'll be. There are only two valid reasons to conceal the code: embarrassment and ill will towards the user. And the only valid reason to make an open-sourced program non-free is greed. None of these are helping the user, the consumer, or whatever you want to call 99% of people who use computers.