It is a known fact that some iPhone apps have been specifically designed to track your geographical location through time, then upload that data to Pinch Media. The company uses this system to inform developers of the number of distinct users who’ve accessed the application, how long it has been used, and so on. Since a number of apps even disclose gender & age to Pinch Media, some now believe they can be considered spyware.

A post on the iPhone Dev Team’s blog caught our attention earlier today. The team of hackers points out to an iPhone app that asks you for permission to use your location.

“If you tap ‘Don’t Allow’, it will ask you again in about a minute, the next time its ad changes,” the team explains. “So you either stop using this app (because it pesters you so much about the location question), or you finally submit and tap ‘OK.’ From that point on, your location and path info (your actual physical path through your area each time you launch the app) belongs to Pinch Media, Inc. We think that’s a Pinch too much,” the Dev Team shares.

According to other people who’ve done some digging up, Pinch Media’s SQL info may include gender and birthday information, which is why they have gone so far as to say that, “ANY pinchmedia iPhone application is spyware.” Pinch Media saw the post by an “anonymous critic” and has decided to fire back.

“We want to address this directly,” Pinch Media writes on the company’s blog. “Spyware and analytics are quite distinct – spyware is software that tracks personally-identifiable information with a malicious or deceptive intent, while analytics tracks anonymous information for benign, useful purposes. Pinch Media’s services are the latter – nothing personally-identifying is ever tracked,” Pinch Media explains.

“[...] None of this information can identify any individual. No names, phone numbers, e-mails, or anything else considered personally-identifiable information is ever collected,” the company dealing with analytics adds, “[...] it’s important to note that this aggregated data is not used for anything malicious – it’s used to help developers make better decisions about their applications.”

Softpedia note
Indeed, “spyware” is too harsh of a term to describe Pinch Media’s activities, although, if the company put its mind to it, it might not find it too hard to directly identify someone. A couple of phone calls based on that user’s location would certainly do the trick. Of course, this is Pinch Media, which does mobile application analytics, not the CIA.