The first app to have been removed from Apple’s AppStore is Aurora Feint, an exciting and well-done (and free) game. The reason is that AF did something weird and insecure with your contact list, submitting it to a centralized server, unecrypted and without user intervention.
Apple pulled it for the time being, and very good that they did, until the developers manage to fix the issue. There are, however, a few other points worth making.
What some lawyers and some companies learned a long time ago is that if you want to keep something private in the age of the Internet, you shouldn’t be coming up with ridiculous legal threats to protect its privacy. It will just blow over and get in the mainstream, generating crazy page hits. Push hard to get some documents kept out of a magazine, and you will get a lot of attention. Try hard to hide code you’ve leaked, and it will multiply.
Take your customers and their friends for idiots and you will get buried. Wow, I hope Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is not what Harvard hopes all of its students turn out to be like. «Continue Reading»
