Apple Restricts 3rd Party Data in iPhone 4.0

<p><pre><code> 1. All user data captured by an application must be for the sole use of that application only (like the Facebook app for example). The use of location based data for targeted advertising is strictly prohibited 2. You may only send user data to a third party which is specific to the services/functionality of your application and also only if the user has given consent. Example: User updates status on Twitter, presses a “Send” button to confirm sending of said tweet. 3. Sending device data to any third party for analysis is now strictly prohibited. Think mobile analysis services such as AdMob here. Presumably you can send this to yourself as the developer though. </code></pre> 1 &#38; 2 are pretty reasonable. 3 makes sense given iAd.

There's a web site that lists iPhone apps that send data to third parties. There really are quite a lot: <a href="http://i-phone-home.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://i-phone-home.blogspot.com/</a><p>I was alerted to it when my own app appeared in their list with two entries -- one for using Flurry analytics, which is true, and another entry for connecting to my own server, which only happens if you're running a pirated version.<p>I was astounded that someone would be so concerned about their privacy being violated... by the software they stole from me. If they're downloading cracked software from strangers I'd say that's a bigger risk than apps phoning home.

Hmm. So ... other developers might turn to old-school analytics packages, which install on their own LAMP / AWS / etc?<p>It's interesting to get all the data yourself, but it's a nightmare for client projects - suddenly you're manually responsible for supporting + maintaining all client projects ... forever.<p>(I made one last year, and I've only been using it for my own apps - it's very similar to Flurry - but I never liked losing the data to a 3rd party. Private - I didn't think anyone else would care enough to NOT use Flurry :))