Recently the article Researchers find phone apps sending data without notification rightly caused a flurry of consternation when it was demonstrated that up to of popular Android apps could be sharing users personal data with shadowy servers somewhere.
Many felt, erroneously, this was some kind of redemption of Apples curated approach. With absolutely no slight intended towards Apple or its App Store Reviewers, it is, in practice, impossible for Apple to guarantee that a users data wont get sent from any application that Apple has approved. In fact, the curated nature of the iOS App Store makes Apples approach less secure in many ways, as the tools used to detect the breaches in security on Android would not be approved on the iOD App Store currently, so iPhone users dont have as simple a way to detect if their phones are sharing their personal information.
To demonstrate my first point, lets assume that the evil foreign company Malfeasance.com wants to harvest e-mail addresses from your iPhone contacts list. They write an app called Somewhat Perturbed Birds which simply reads your contact list, bundles it up, and uploads it to http://malfeasance.com.
Would Apple catch this? Maybe. Realize that many applications phone home when you run them, with reasons many would consider legitimate, with Apples blessing. Almost every game on my iPhone right now connects to a central server when I run it, to hook me up with other users and let me join teh social. Farmville (which I dont have) connects to a server. All OpenFeint and Plus+ games connect to a server. Words with Bugs er, Friends connects to a server.
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