Was drinking in a bar in Espoo in 2012 or 2013 and heard this from someone at rovio.
At the time they used Riak db and basho were onsite and we asked why they didn't enable inter server encryption. "Because nsa pay us 10m not to".
Guess nsa pulled the Riak cluster protocol off the aws fibre.
This is exactly why adversarial countries like China want to block large multinational social media and technology companies from their market. India saw facebook try to meddle in their elections. This is probably why the US <i>should</i> block TikTok, although there are further repercussions on free speech and the free market (something China ideologically doesn’t care about).
Rather than going through 1000s of app companies, why not go directly to the 100s of third party analytic companies?<p>From my research most all apps use some SDK which tracks users. Many apps use 3 or 4 for various marketing / product / business use cases. I've been tracking this on <a href="https://appgoblin.info/companies" rel="nofollow">https://appgoblin.info/companies</a> if anyone wants to check. Try looking at the "no analytics" found groups, which are just apps I haven't found evidence of 3rd party trackers, almost certainly they do use them.<p>I would like to see world where Angry Birds data at least stays on Angry Birds servers and have been working on building a part of that with OpenAttribution (<a href="https://openattribution.dev" rel="nofollow">https://openattribution.dev</a>) to let app/game companies build their marketing pipeline with at least one less tracker in the app.<p>I think as compute is getting cheaper a lot of this should/can be self-hosted by at least larger companies so they have full control of their BI tools and the data underlying it.
2014? this is really old news, and there's no smoking gun in here. it's not like they are looking through your camera or listening to your mic, it's just "who is using this app" type stuff, and the NSA denies they target people who they are not seeking for other reasons<p>i'm not saying "believe the NSA" or the Five Eyes, but you already know how you think about that
>It wasn't clear precisely what information can be extracted from which apps, but one of the slides gave the example of a user who uploaded a photo using a social media app. Under the words, "Golden Nugget!" it said that the data generated by the app could be examined to determine a phone's settings, where it connected to, which websites it had visited, which documents it had downloaded, and who its users' friends were.<p>Sounds like those apps weren't using SSL, and NSA could eavesdrop on whatever API calls or telemetry it was sending? There's no real evidence that those apps are complicit, even though the article tries to imply that.