Nothing makes a person’s skin crawl more than a clingy significant other. Well, except maybe a clingy, creepy app that is gathering as much data about your and our life as possible. I shudder to think if your clingy S.O. wrote the app, but that isn’t the case, yet!
Creeeeeeepy...
Advertising demographics are the crown jewel of many companies, just ask Google. Asking for that data and letting the user know what is being collected, how often and how it will be used is almost expected.
According to Veracode, Pandora wants to keep tabs on where you are, your age, what your Android ID is and even what gender you are. To add fuel to fire, they are not upfront about the ‘what, how often and how” all this data is being used.
Admob and Admarvel are primary means they use to gather the information and those are both advertising agencies who really would like to have continuous data about where you are, who you are and what you are doing. Overall the data isn’t something that would allow anyone to ransack your bank account but at the same time I have to agree with how Tyler Shields of Veracode put it:
“When all that is placed into a single basket, it’s pretty easy to determine who someone is, what they do for a living, who they associate with, and any number of other traits about them. I don’t know about you, but that feels a little Orwellian to me.”
Everyone needs to pay the bills and keep the servers running, but be upfront Pandora and let people know what data is being collected and how it will be used. The downside to being upfront is if things go wrong, someone might point a finger at you for screwing up.
Hey, it might not be about money at all. They might simply be avoiding being responsible to their users. Still creepy.
