Retrievable iPhone Numbers Raise Privacy Issue

TechnologyResource writes "When a couple of voicemails didn't show up recently, I thought nothing of it until a friend asked me if I'd gotten his message — people just don't call me that often. But the iPhone is indeed a phone, as some users are reportedly being reminded when they get phone calls from the publishers of a free app they've downloaded from the App Store. The application in question, mogoRoad, is a real-time traffic monitoring application. As invasive and despicable as that sounds, it raises another question: how did the company get hold of the contact information for those users? Mogo claims the details were provided by Apple, but Apple doesn't disclose that information to App Store vendors. French site Mac 4 Ever did some digging (scroll down for the English version) and determined it was possible — even easy — for an app to retrieve the phone number of a unit on which it was installed."

You Think That's Bad?

[eldavojohn]

That's nothing. You can use the Core Location Framework [apple.com] to figure out where they are. So I sold an application to celebrities only that shows them where the paparazzi are, it's called iAvoidPaparazzi. Then iAvoidPaparazzi sends my server their location which gets fed into another application called iMolestCelebs that I sell to tabloids and paparazzi. Then their information comes back to my server and gets fed out to iAvoidPaparazzi. Yeah it took me a few weeks to prime the pump so to speak but once this gets rolling I'm sure I'll make some huge bank off of it ... at least until I get shutdown after I take the heat for a few Princess Dianas. *sigh* A man can't make an honest living these days ...

Re:So

[tonywong]

meh. of course the garbage in the post doesn't show up when you hit preview.../. please fix.

Need your phone number stolen?

[secretvampire]

There's an app for that.

Cool story brah

[Anonymous Coward]

"When a couple of voicemails didn't show up recently, I thought nothing of it until a friend asked me if I'd gotten his message â" people just don't call me that often."

wtf does this have to do with anything?

"But the iPhone is indeed a phone..."

Glad you set that up for us.

Re:You Think That's Bad?

[adolf]

That's just because nobody actually lives there.

....people just don't call me that often

[mevets]

.... and the iPhone fixed that. Is there anything that phone can't do?

Re:Where's the mainstream media?

[commodoresloat]

Where's the mainstream media?

Well, according to their CoreLocation information that I got via their iPhones using this iSeeYou app I developed, they're at 38.174104,-85.765784.

Re:It Happend to me......

[Slashcrap]

Yes, schools like this prey on the uneducated

Yes, the uneducated do tend to be the target market for schools. Thanks for the insight.