Developer Accused of Stealing iPhone Numbers

[HardOCP News]

Storm8, a company that makes popular games for the iPhone, is being accused of stealing phone numbers by exploiting a backdoor iPhone vulnerability. The company initially claimed it was a bug but has not commented on the current lawsuit.

"Storm8 has written the software for all its games in such a way that it automatically accesses, collects, and transmits the wireless telephone number of each iPhone user who downloads any Storm8 game," the suit alleges. " ... Storm8, though, has no reason whatsoever to access the wireless phone numbers of the iPhones on which its games are installed."

 

[Gorankar]

The only nearly legit reason this I can think of for this, is tracking the number of times their software was purchased from the i-phones store. The only reason I can think of for doing that, is that they believe Apple is trying to screw them. Not that that is a good excuse. there are other more legal ways to go about insuring they are getting their rightful cut.

All other reasons for collecting that data that I can think of, ranges from very distasteful to illegal.

 

[Gorankar]

B4 I get attacked, I am not suggesting Apple is ripping anyone off. Was merely offering one less troublesome reason that Storm8 may have done this.

 

[veritas7]

He could have collected their phone number then hashed it, right? Or some other unique hardware ID?

Wouldn't that be a more logical and less privacy-issue solution?

 

[Myg]

GORANKAR: thats rubbish, they could easily hash the number and send the unique md5 off to check that. This was obviously intended.

 

[Gorankar]

GORANKAR: thats rubbish, they could easily hash the number and send the unique md5 off to check that. This was obviously intended.

Then roast them.
Was just offering the only possible excuse I thought they could come up with. And even then I said it was not a good one.

 

[jeremyshaw]

Then roast them.
Was just offering the only possible excuse I thought they could come up with. And even then I said it was not a good one.

flame bash smash and all that good stuff.


Yeah... at least it will stop my addiction to their silly cookie cutter games if they go down.

 

[chrispix]

Doing some android dev work, we can pull the IMEI number off the phone. That makes it a pretty good unique identifier, without letting us know who the user is.. Then we can use that to handle some statistics on our services.