FTC Drops the Hammer On Maker of Location-Sharing Flashlight App

chicksdaddy writes "The Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday that it settled with the maker of 'Brightest Flashlight Free,' a popular Android mobile application, over charges that the company used deceptive advertising to collect location and device information from Android owners. The FTC says the company failed to disclose wanton harvesting and sharing of customers' locations and mobile device identities with third parties. Brightest Flashlight Free, which allows Android owners to use their phone as a flashlight, is a top download from Google Play, the main Android marketplace. Statistics from the site indicate that it has been downloaded more than one million times with an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars. The application, which is available for free, displays mobile advertisements on the devices it is installed on. However, the device also harvested a wide range of data from Android phones which was shared with advertisers, including what the FTC describes as 'precise geolocation along with persistent device identifiers.' As part of the settlement with the FTC, Goldenshores is ordered to change its advertisements and in-app disclosures to make explicit any collection of geolocation information, how it is or may be used, the reason for collecting location information and which third parties that data is shared with."

Comments

Re:Security model

[MachineShedFred]

On iOS, you do have granular permissions - if an app requests your location, you can say no, and the app can go fuck itself - the API doesn't give it shit. It's not all-or-nothing.

Disabling data access per app is a different story though, so your point still stands.

Re:Why can't they copy this from iOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh you have a Nexus 7? Perfect, you can download App Ops to select permissions on a per-app basis.

Any Android 4.3 or higher device supports it. And root is not required.