Be careful with that new technology in your hand. An examination of 101 popular smartphone apps (games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones) showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location. Five sent age, gender, and other personal details to outsiders.
The findings reveal the efforts by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to build databases of information about them. Many companies don't have privacy policies and there isn't much you can do about it.
iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google's Android operating system. Apps sharing the most information included TextPlus 4, for text messaging. It sent the phone's unique ID number to eight ad companies and the phone's zip code, along with the user's age and gender, to two of them.
Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a music app, sent age, gender, location, and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of the game Paper Toss each sent the phone's ID number to at least five ad companies.
Millennial Media lists 11 types of information about people that developers may transmit to "help Millennial provide more relevant ads." They include age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and political views. MySpace also sent a user's income, ethnicity and parental status. Bottom line, the more you play, the more you pay is even more true in the information age.