Did it ever happen to you that you download a free iPhone app from the App Store and there on you are bombarded with dozens of telemarketing calls?
A French website, Mac4Ever is reporting that a free Swiss traffic app has done exactly that and the mobile number of a lot of iPhone users have been compromised.
The website reports that the investigation into this was made after a lot of its readers reported about calls from telemarketers soon after the download of one particular app called mogoRoad. The comments on iTunes confirms that a lot many users who downloaded this app had in fact received the call.
Apple's privacy policies explicitly precludes the company from divulging customer information to the app developers. However, programmers can apparently dig out information about the customer with just one unique line of code in the app. And this loophole has existed on the iPhone SDK since firmware 2.1.
Mac4Ever reports:
"From a client's side, Apple is the unique entiy you can deal with (except for the support). For a developer, it's quite the same : you can only deal with Apple, who never give you an access to the client's information. But it appears that this behaviour is available since firmware 2.1! So, how can't Cupertino be aware of such a thing? And how many apps are involved?"
It is pretty unlikely that Apple is not aware of this potential privacy breach. And considering that close to 70% of the iPhone apps downloaded are free apps, scammers would find this population an easy bait to reach out to. Also in question is the app review procedure. If iPhone apps such as 0870 can be rejected just for mildly inconveniencing its partner carriers, it pretty much mandates that the review staff also look into the core of the app to watch out for any kind of privacy breaches that the iPhone app can cause.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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