14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, it was revealed that the British and American intelligence agencies have been collecting data from mobile apps without anyone’s knowledge.
Understandably, this isn’t something that went over well with developers or smartphone users and privacy advocates.
“When data is gathered without the user’s knowledge, and when that data is shared with third parties without the user’s permission, it does create concern for both users and for developers,” Andrew Maltin said for Softpedia.
Maltin is CEO of MEDL Mobile, the developer behind mobile app Hang w/ and a member of the board of directors of the Application Developers Alliance, an organization that slammed the NSA over app spying earlier this week.
“We believe the best course of action is to be transparent about what data is collected - and then to use that data (in a depersonalized manner) to make the app experience better for all users,” Maltin said.
The exec believes that it’s been a damaging story for delopers, especially when being told under the headline of “privacy invasion”. He states that developers are generally working to make apps and technology efficient, intuitive and helpful and that’s what the collected data normally serves for.
According to the reports from earlier this week, the intelligence agencies have managed to find a way to harvest sensitive personal data from smartphones via a series of popular apps, including Angry Birds, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
This was done via third-party advertisers that get onto the devices when apps are downloaded. Mixing the ads with geolocation data embedded in images when someone posts a mobile-taken photo to social media helps spies get anyone’s exact position.
The information collected can also provide additional personal information about the users, such as home country, marital status, income, ethnicity, education level and number of children, to name just a few.