Smartphone and the death of privacy!

There is a lot of research going on at Dartmouth College in collaboration with Nokia Research center. The research is to make your smartphone even smarter. A new app is in the making and it tries to the fit the puzzle. Called as Jigsaw, the app will be released for Nokia and iPhone. Jigsaw tries to find out what you are doing at all times and transmits that information. It uses the phone’s microphone, accelerometer and GPS to find your mood. It can read the jolts produced by your walking to say where you kept your phone.

The only problem with this app is power management. Since the app has to run in the background, it can suck out a lot of battery. Would that be a problem? You might be thinking about the power management but there is something else. And power management is the least of your worries on the ‘smartphone’. What Jigsaw is doing is invading your privacy, with your permission of course. There are lot of apps which invade your privacy without your permission. May be with your permission. Because there could be clause slipped in somewhere in the EULA. You never know.

photo © 2010 Bernardo Mayer | more info (via: Wylio)

WSJ investigated 101 apps for Android and iPhone. There is common trend. When it comes to apps, Android and iOS aren’t all that different. Most of the time they might be coming from the same app developers and have the same snooping-in protocol. Here’s what they found about Pandora.

Pandora isn’t alone.

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.

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.

Paper Toss is one of the top free games/apps for iPhone in 2010. You can only imagine the kind of data the developers are sitting on. Looks like there is no way of opting out of this tracking. Most send Location, Phone ID, Age, gender and contacts. Some apps like Foursquare, WhatsApp Messenger, Bejeweled 2 and Textplus 4 send your phone number too.

When you are checking in, there’s someone who is checking you out.

Looks like smartphone’s are designed to make everyone else smarter, except the user. Smartphone – For the manufacturers, advertisers and the app developers. For you? You decide.

Now you don’t have to worry about the scanner at the airport, because you now know what you are holding in your shirt pocket. Sorry, make that pant pocket as per the information we just got from your jolt.