Pandora App Sends Private Data To Advertisers 198
Trailrunner7 writes "An analysis of the popular free mobile application from online music service Pandora.com that is the subject of a grand jury investigation into loose data privacy practices in the mobile application market confirms that the application silently sends reams of sensitive data to advertisers. The analysis was conducted by application security firm Veracode and found that Pandora's free mobile application for Android phones tracked and submitted a range of data, including the user's gender, geographic location and the unique ID of their phone, according to an entry on Veracode's blog."
Not just android (Score:5, Interesting)
The actual Vericode post [veracode.com] says it's both the iPhone and Android versions. I'm not sure why the article linked in the summary [and thus the summary] only mentions the Android version.
I wonder then, does the web browser interface do something similar, minus the GPS info of course? What about the Pandora One desktop app?
Looking forward for Pandora IPO (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite the suit, recent SEC filing [sec.gov] suggest eveything pointing up:
* Revenue skyrocketed from $55,189,000 in FY2010 to $137,764,000 in FY2011.
* Advertising revenue rose from $50,147,000 in FY2010 to $119,333,000 in FY2011.
* Subscription and "other" revenue increased from $5,042,000 in FY2010 to $18,431,000 in FY2011.
* Despite rising content acquisition costs (up from $32,946,000 to $69,357,000 between FY2010 and 2011), Pandora's loss narrowed from $15,549,000 in FY2010 to $321,000 in FY2011.
Despite strong competition such as Sirius XM radio and even Apple to that regard, I wouldn't worry much.