When we first get a smartphone, what is the first thing we think of doing? Downloading all the popular free apps of course!
After reading this article however, you may want to reconsider the faith you put in iPhone, Android, and iPad apps. Popular apps that one may use every day have been discovered to transmit your personal information to third parties (such as advertising companies) without you even knowing it. In a test of 101 popular smartphone apps, “56 transmitted information about the mobile device’s unique ID to ad companies, 47 transmitted location of the phone, while 5 transmitted the users’ gender and age to third-parties.” For example, Pandora, the popular online radio app, was found to transmit the user’s age, gender, location, and mobile phone ID to third parties and other apps such as Weather Channel, TextPlus 4, and games such as Paper Toss were all found to give some form of personal information away to advertising companies. Especially because the information transfer was done without the user knowing, Apple has encountered lawsuits from unhappy users. It’s hard to tell if it’s possible to change this transfer of private information though; are we too far gone? Are we at the point where it’s inevitable that our information will never be completely private? It sure seems that way.
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