A class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco wants to take iPhone game developer Storm8 to task for what it calls "malicious software code." The suit accuses Storm8 of exploiting a backdoor method to retrieve users' phone numbers without their permission in games such as "iMobsters" and "Vampires Live." We reached out to Apple for a comment, and though the representative we spoke wasn't familiar with the case, he did articulate Apple's position on the practice Storm8 has been accused of.
"There is no violating privacy," Apple's VP of iPod and iPhone product marketing Greg Joswiak told MTV News. "That's one of the things we look for, so if that did happen I'm either unaware or unfamiliar."
The lawsuit, does not point any fingers at Apple. It even corroborate's Apple's policy. "Apple does not provide to sellers the personal information of iPhone or iPod Touch users to App Store developers, such as Storm8," the suit reads.
Joswiak explained that any developers found engaging in such practices could face having their apps pulled from the App Store.
"That's one of the things that we're always looking for," Joswiak said. "That's part of the beauty of the way we have the App Store set up, because if you find something like that out we can deal with it. A) We can pull it down. B) We know who the developer is. Remember there's nothing anonymous."
Storm8 currently has dozens of apps downloadable through the App Store, which have not been taken down, and contends that number farming was a "bug" in their games' software. The lawsuit contends that coding capable of pulling numbers would have to be too complex to be an accident. Bug or not, if any of games are found doing such things again, there could have more than consumers to worry about, since Joswiak explicitly called such information farming without consent "verboten."
Have you downloaded or used any Storm8 games from the App Store? Do you think the number pulling could have been caused by a bug?
Oh my.. that's really serious!
I would ask these questions:
1.) What was it doing with the phone numbers?
If it sends the phone numbers back to Storm8 then obviously that is a problem. The app would need programming to tell it to send the data to Storm8, so they would most likely be guilty.
If it does not send the number.. if it just saves it along with a lot of other data on your iPhone... then maybe there is no problem.
2.) Does the app collect other personal information?
For example, does it collect your name and maybe your address? If it collects that information, then maybe there could be a bug that tells it to pull all of the person's information instead of stopping at their name.
As in #1, the real question would be: What happens to the data? If it only saves it on the iPhone then that is not a problem. If it sends it all back to Storm8, then that is a huge problem.
I think that it is unlikely that this could be a bug, but it is not impossible. You know, I am not an iPhone developer, so I can only guess at the way that information is retrieved.
If it is possible to retrieve all of that information through a bug then this is a big problem! Clearly it should not be so easy to obtain personal information by accident.
Fri Nov 13 2009 11:33AMI think what they are pointing about is phone numbers are private.. :) And if Storm8 collect phone numbers who knows what they can do to it.. They can make calls for advertisements or scatter your number to advertisement agencies and you will just ask yourself why are you receiving calls lately to anonymous.. XD
Sat Nov 14 2009 7:15PMMMORPG.com writes:
Login or Register to post a comment