[Faline]

The small print included with many mobile phone apps is giving their developers the right to rifle through users' phone books, text messages and emails.
By agreeing to little-read terms and conditions documents, phone users are giving developers the right to inspect their personal information and even find out who they are talking to.
In many shocking cases, users are even giving apps the right to collect whatever images the camera happens to be seeing, as well as the phone's location.
Facebook, Yahoo!, Flickr and Badoo all admitted to reading users' text messages through their Android smartphone apps, the Sunday Times reported.
And many other apps from less well-known developers, many of them available for free, are also including the rights to access your personal data in their terms and conditions.
Academics are now warning the many apps are little more than 'fronts' to allow companies to hoover up personal data and pass them on to advertisers for a fee.
But the revelations also make clear that the wealth of data collected by the new generation of smartphones could pose a serious risk to users' privacy.



Daniel Rosenfield, director of Sun Products, a successful app business whose products are downloaded at a rate of 5,000 a day, said the information was requested by advertisers.
'You can sell your app but the revenue you get from selling your apps doesn't touch the revenue you get from giving your apps away for free and just loading them with advertisements,' he told the Sunday Times.
Unlike Android apps, Apple iPhone apps are covered by a general terms and conditions policy, which runs to astonishing 17,000 words.
However, the company also faced embarrassment earlier this month when it emerged some companies with iPhone apps were harvesting contact lists from customers mobile phone address books without telling them.
Twitter admitted that it copied lists of email addresses and phone numbers from those who used its smartphone application and stored them on its servers without asking users' permission.
Steve Jobs, Apple's late founder and the mastermind behind the iPhone, himself spoke of the dangers of instrusive apps in 2007, warning that many 'want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up.'
Chris Brauer, co-director of the centre for Creative and Social Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London, echoed the concerns.
He warned that the ubiquitous smartphones have become 'a source for incredibly rich information about people's lives.
'A lot of apps are fronts for various companies who are now capturing this data.'

[Zambini]

Damn scary stuff

[kellyhound]

doesn't surprise me a bit.
On a another level http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecom...data_retention

[scubahood]

and people laugh cuz i have tape covering all my cams

[ernyzaz]

kelly that was already reported by wikileaks, i posted it here.. Its like if you iphone or blackberry, you are screwed

[TheCapn]

Dont see the big deal..i dont really care if companies have my information. I can just say no to buying stuff. And they cant call you if you block their number.

[Dynamo47]

What's really scary is someone stole my identity....

AND GAVE IT BACK!!!

[thissiteisfuckedup]

Originally Posted by scubahood ↗

and people laugh cuz i have tape covering all my cams

i do this too!!! haha i thought i was only one, i cover my ipod touch cam and my htcdesire HD cam.

[scubahood]

Originally Posted by thissiteisfuckedup ↗

i do this too!!! haha i thought i was only one, i cover my ipod touch cam and my htcdesire HD cam.

fuck that shit man.. if people actually wanted these cams so bad they would be a paid for upgrade.. not base model feature

are we so dumb to think the tech companies are just being nice? free cameras for all!