Is The iPhone Truely Protecting Your Privacy?
If a new report authored by Bucknell University Assistant Director of Information Security and Networking, Eric Smith, is to be believed, you may be revealing far more about yourself than you realize.
"...Amazon’s application communicates the logged-in user’s real name in plain text, along with the UDID, permitting both Amazon.com and network eavesdroppers to easily match a phone’s UDID with the name of the phone’s owner. The CBS News application transmits both the UDID and the iPhone device’s user-assigned name, which frequently contains the owner’s real name" -- VIA Smith's Report
Sure, these may be isolated examples of only two different applications that are passing back your personal information, but when a poll was conducted of fifty-seven free applications on the App Store, sixty-eight percent passed along your UDID to their servers. When you combine that with cookies that have a twenty year expiration cycle, as noted by ArsTechnica's formal report, this could be a serious cause for concern.
All it would take is a bit of social engineering for an industrious person to connect the dots and suddenly your secrets would be no more. This information isn't typically shared amongst other sites, but this information is being logged and you better assume that some day these companies plan to cash in. I am calling it now, Skynet is coming -- so be careful where you are surfing.
Sources:
[ via ArsTechnica ]
