Curious about what kinds of data apps are sending to third parties?

The Wall Street Journal studied 101 popular applications to figure out what types of information iOS and Android apps are sending to third party vendors. The results are quite staggering. You can bet that this type of information is going to play a huge role in 2011.

Some apps are better than others, but the worst offenders send off your username and password, contacts, age, gender, location, iPhoneID and phone number.

Text Plus 4 seems to be the worst offender, sending off all that information to either the developer or third parties.

You can check out the information directly on the Wall Street Journal website.

So what do you think? Is this a major privacy concern moving forward? Could this be the underlying reason why Steve Jobs is refusing to give digital magazine publishers access to user information? Personally I can’t think of one reason why these applications are forwarding off our information to third parties.  Do you consider this data theft?

Sound off in the comments.

Article Via The Wall Street Journal
Tip Via Corey Tamas

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.