“Apple Inc.’s new rules for app developers limit their ability to harvest user contact data, but they also could hurt a key app owned by Facebook Inc. called Onavo Protect,” Mark Gurman and Sarah Frier report for Bloomberg.
“The iPhone maker’s updated App Store Review Guidelines ban applications that ‘collect information about which other apps are installed on a user’s device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/marketing,'” Gurman and Sarah Frier report. “This could give Apple grounds to remove the Onavo app, although the software is still available despite the rules kicking in last week.”
“Onavo Protect, when installed on an iPhone or Android device, uses a virtual private network to scan incoming and outgoing internet connectivity,” Gurman and Sarah Frier report. “It also gathers information about users’ devices, their location, apps installed on the gadgets and how people use those apps, what websites they visit, and the amount of data used.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The potential for less snooping for Facebook sounds like a good thing to us!