Free App Grabs Your Phone Number, Then Calls You…
Thanks to Allen for this one:
A French Mac web site, Mac4Ever.com, reports that a free Swiss traffic info app, mogoRoad (not available in US App Store), grabs your phone number and sends it to a remote collecting database. Some time soon after users ran the app, they received a telemarketing phone call.
A big deal is being made out of the fact that an app gained access to the user’s phone number “with only a single line of code”. Let’s be clear here. The fact that an app can easily retrieve your phone number is a cause for celebration. What a tremendous platform we work on. Apple puts an incredible amount of power in the hands of its developers who use that power to create great apps. Would you have Apple hamstring the SDK so you could not access the Address Book? Ridiculous.
In my opinion, developers who use their apps for evil should lose their ability to bring their apps to the App Store. That’s the solution. Please stop complaining about this. The iPhone SDK is a remarkable achievement, on a par with the original Mac Toolbox. I love the fact that I can so easily do so much with so little code…
– Dave
