Pandora App Sends Private Data To Advertisers

Trailrunner7 writes "An analysis of the popular free mobile application from online music service Pandora.com that is the subject of a grand jury investigation into loose data privacy practices in the mobile application market confirms that the application silently sends reams of sensitive data to advertisers. The analysis was conducted by application security firm Veracode and found that Pandora's free mobile application for Android phones tracked and submitted a range of data, including the user's gender, geographic location and the unique ID of their phone, according to an entry on Veracode's blog."

Comments

Shut up and take my infos!

[dleemaas]

Pandora can have the SSNs of everyone I know if they'll just keep providing their free musical goodness.

What about iOS version?

[chiph]

Wondering if I should uninstall their app from my iPhone.

Re:As I said last time

[npsimons]

No one talks about the data stealing on iPhones. Is that because we know they are not doing it on iPhone, or because the iPhone doesn't warn the user that the app is stealing their data.

No, it's because anyone with half a clue already knows that iPhones don't belong to the people carting them around, they belong to Apple; therefore, any info put on an iPhone automatically belongs to Apple. Probably Apple doesn't do much of anything with this info, that's not really a part of their business plan (yet), and Apple is such a control freak it probably won't let anyone else touch the data. But just wait until iPhone market share starts to seriously decline, then you will see Apple start making deals with "research firms" to "enhance the end user experience." Heck, they've already allowed devs to allow ads on their apps if they so choose.

Re:what do you expect for free?

[bonch]

This is Slashdot. When Google indexes all your personal data for advertisers, it's okay. When non-Google companies do it, it's evil.