The developers of Angry Birds have hit back at renewed allegations that the ultra-popular game leaks users' personal information. Security vendor FireEye put out a detailed critique of Angry Birds last week claiming that the smartphone game leaked data like a sieve. An early March update of Angry Birds, available through …

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Tuesday 1st April 2014 16:35 GMT Irongut

Ad networks use a unique id plus your age and gender to target ads to you.

Wow, who knew?

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1. Tuesday 1st April 2014 16:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Well, lucky for me i'm an 89 year old woman...
  
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Tuesday 1st April 2014 16:49 GMT chris lively

Reading between the lines

After parsing the statement it sounds like:

1. Rovio does pass this information to the 3rd parties.

2. Rovio has an agreement with the 3rd parties that they are not allowed to transfer the data to someone else.

None of that seems to assuage the original issue described by FireEye which is saying that Angry Bird data is gathered, stored and shared across the web. Obviously it is gathered, stored and shared with the advertisers.

Now, I'm not sure why the NSA would want to bother contacting Rovio directly for the data - so I believe them on that statement. However, I could absolutely see the NSA forcing the various ad platforms to hand over their information - it's much easier to contact a handful of companies instead of going through all of the ad vendor customers. This wouldn't break the agreement with Rovio and Rovio wouldn't even know about it.

Essentially, Rovio's statements are utterly meaningless.

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Tuesday 1st April 2014 19:41 GMT Anonymous Coward

Angry Birds used to send real-time usage data to data.flurry.com, eg which bits of the screen you pressed on and how long you were on a screen for. It was sent in the form of URL headers.

To see this install Fiddler from http://www.telerik.com/fiddler and then set the IP of the machine it's running on as a network proxy in your iphone, ipad or android device then just start playing Angry Birds, and also other apps. Watch with increasing horror as previously unseen filthy behavioural analytics scrolls before your eyes.

Blocking data.flurry.com at the gateway stops it but it's whack-a-mole, there are plenty of other such companies as in this article.

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Tuesday 1st April 2014 20:43 GMT Anonymous Coward

Interesting. I wonder if they can tell me my five-year-old son's political beliefs and sexual preferences? That ought to be an interesting read.

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Wednesday 2nd April 2014 04:20 GMT Stingray

Time for a Privacy Guarentee

It is time governments and privacy watchdogs started pushing for a "Privacy Guarantee" instead of a "Privacy Policy" Companies should be required to warrant the quality of their privacy claims as the do the quality of their manufacturing and product claims.

Yes, it should be taken that seriously and it should be as actionable in court as a quality assurance or product warranty is actionable. This would make customer's privacy a line item in the profit/loss statement and would force executives to PAY ATTENTION.

My 2 cents :-)

Cheers.

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