Rovio has denied speculation that they are involved in giving out Angry Birds user information to surveillance organizations like the NSA.
As Rovio points out, this stems from Guardian’s latest reports on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. These new documents allege that NSA, and UK equivalent GCHQ, has been collecting information from mobile users of games like Angry Birds in its data collection efforts.
According to the Guardian report, the data can vary from smartphone model and app, and what data these devices extract. At the bare minimum, they can identify your handset model, handset ID, software version and so forth. If possible, the apps can yield information that gives out key details of a user’s life, including age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, income, ethnicity, etc.
In Rovio’s statement, they flat out deny that they are in collusion with any surveillance agencies like the NSA or GCHQ to share any user data. They do point out that user data can be collected from these apps by third parties using sophisticated tools. Rovio claims that this is a vulnerability common to all mobile apps, and they intend to investigate if any 3rd parties are involved in such activity.
The Guardian report has incorporated Rovio’s statement in their report. However, based on their data, they claim that Angry Birds was an example used for this activity, and that data was acquired from a mobile ad platform that does work with Rovio, Millenial Media. Millenial has not released a statement regarding this issue.
