Aug 20
ericeissensA while ago the iPhone Dev Team announced that Pinch Media’s apps were spying on users and sending data about you to third parties without your consent. Now there’s another app that spies on you. The app is called “Police Scanner” and is created by Juicy Development.
Below is a list of things the data they can obtain:
* iPhone’s unique ID
* iPhone Model
* OS Version
* Application version
* If the application is cracked/pirated
* If your iPhone is jailbroken
* Time & date you start the application
* Time & date you close the application
* Your current latitude & longitude
* Your gender (if Facebook enabled)
* Your birth month (if Facebook enabled)
* iPhone Model
* OS Version
* Application version
* If the application is cracked/pirated
* If your iPhone is jailbroken
* Time & date you start the application
* Time & date you close the application
* Your current latitude & longitude
* Your gender (if Facebook enabled)
* Your birth month (if Facebook enabled)
They never ask you to give permission to use personal data for their app or something like that. This kind of software can be categorized as iPhone Spyware.
Update: version 1.2 of Police Scanner does not send as much personal information anymore, since most date has moved to the device so it needs less web requests.
August 20th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Sorry, but saying Police Scanner spies on you because it uses Pinch Media is like saying iphonefreakz.com, this very website, spies on you because it uses Google Analytics (I checked the source, it’s there). And like many web sites use Google Analytics, tracking many of the same things (location, OS version, browser version, etc.) without my agreement, so do many iPhone apps use Pinch Media for the same thing.
And yes, it’s true that older versions transmitted limited information about the user to our own servers (not 3rd parties as the original reports claim), however it was part of a data request without which the application would be completely useless. It’s hard for the servers to tell you what streams are near you when they don’t know where you are. Since version 1.2 most data has been moved to the device, requiring fewer web requests.
(How many blogs do I have to leave this same comment on?)
August 20th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Now, why would Apple allow something like this and deny something like Grand Central?
August 21st, 2009 at 12:14 am
Please try to be a little more accurate in your description. Juicy development does not access personal information and if they did would never share it with any third party.
Please refer to the following article for a little more accurate information:
http://www.pinchmedia.com/blog/pinch-media-user-privacy-and-spyware/