The Wall Street Journal on the proliferation of smartphone apps that send information about their users to advertisers without permission:
Apps sharing the most information included TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app 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 popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone’s ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies.
In an increasing number of areas of our lives, we’re offered a stark choice – go along with the state of affairs or be left out altogether. There is no middle ground. The new work-life balance (or its extinction). Personal Finance. Insurance. Social Networking. Smartphone apps. In most cases, the trade-off isn’t bad enough for most of us so we go along (take Facebook and privacy, for instance). At some point, it will get bad enough for us to pause. And then we’ll have to evaluate what’s truly important to us and consciously weigh that trade-off.