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Any idea why Angry Birds would be collecting your Location and giving it to Google and Flurry Analytics, according to this infographic? Does WSJ mean location

Any idea why Angry Birds would be collecting your Location and giving it to Google and Flurry Analytics, according to this infographic? Does WSJ mean location as in your approximate locale (useful to understand where your users are coming from), or actual GPS coordinates? Their lack of specificity is a bit confusing.

gommm 16y ago
It seems that for example for Angry bird they send the Latitude/Longitude http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/2010/12/17/angry-birds/ http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/2010/12/17/angry-birds/
ergo98 16y ago
Angry Birds only requests the following two permissions on Android- -Network Communications -System tools (prevent phone from sleeping) This doesn't include even coarse location, much less a fine GPS position. Unless they're cracking your system, they can't get more than a guessed geolocation of the IP address you're at. Nor can they access your contacts, read your personal details, steal your emails, read your phones identifier, etc. Looking at the WSJ story, they don't even include Angry Birds under Android in their analysis. It is, I think, fascinating that there were so many stories on here about Android apps "stealing your data", yet the iPhone market remained opaque, with so many holding some unsupported notion that a high level curation guaranteed good app behavior. In this case, despite the Android version being only ad supported, I have comfort that it can't possibly be doing what the iPhone app is doing.
gyardley 16y ago
People collect location for a lot of reasons - localizing content, planning local advertising purchases, selling in-app advertising to agencies who want to buy access to a particular audience, etc. Sometimes developers just want to understand where their users are coming from out of curiosity. Usually country and state fulfills the above purposes just fine. I've seen GPS coordinates sent off the device and then converted to country / state before the coordinates were discarded - that's how Pinch Media used to do it. Flurry typically just works with IP address, but when GPS is used, it does the rounding off on the device first so the only thing we're sent is already inaccurate.
ddlatham 16y ago
Flurry Analytics will show you how many users and sessions you have in each city / state / country.

gommm 16y ago

It seems that for example for Angry bird they send the Latitude/Longitude http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/2010/12/17/angry-birds/ http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/2010/12/17/angry-birds/

ergo98 16y ago

Angry Birds only requests the following two permissions on Android- -Network Communications -System tools (prevent phone from sleeping) This doesn't include even coarse location, much less a fine GPS position. Unless they're cracking your system, they can't get more than a guessed geolocation of the IP address you're at. Nor can they access your contacts, read your personal details, steal your emails, read your phones identifier, etc. Looking at the WSJ story, they don't even include Angry Birds under Android in their analysis. It is, I think, fascinating that there were so many stories on here about Android apps "stealing your data", yet the iPhone market remained opaque, with so many holding some unsupported notion that a high level curation guaranteed good app behavior. In this case, despite the Android version being only ad supported, I have comfort that it can't possibly be doing what the iPhone app is doing.

gyardley 16y ago

People collect location for a lot of reasons - localizing content, planning local advertising purchases, selling in-app advertising to agencies who want to buy access to a particular audience, etc. Sometimes developers just want to understand where their users are coming from out of curiosity. Usually country and state fulfills the above purposes just fine. I've seen GPS coordinates sent off the device and then converted to country / state before the coordinates were discarded - that's how Pinch Media used to do it. Flurry typically just works with IP address, but when GPS is used, it does the rounding off on the device first so the only thing we're sent is already inaccurate.

ddlatham 16y ago

Flurry Analytics will show you how many users and sessions you have in each city / state / country.