iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad applications using TapJoyAds

Why applications using TapJoyAds might be called Tracking Software or Spyware

As an introduction, please read our article on how we classify products for detection in Spybot.

Do TapJoyAds enabled apps really collect PII (personally identifiable information)?

Monitoring of traffic going out to TapJoyAds servers show for example that the UDID gets transmitted. An anonymized example:

Code:

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GET /Connect?country_code=DE&language_code=de&lad=42&app_version=1.1&os_version=4.0&device_type=iPhone&app_id=818c9bc8-6cd6-4b0c-9241-07665626a913&library_version=7.2.1&udid=1234567890123456789012345678901234567890&device_name=iPhone2,1 HTTP/1.1
Host: ws.tapjoyads.com
User-Agent: Doodle%20Devil/1.1 CFNetwork/485.2 Darwin/10.3.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: de-de
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

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Now lets take a look at Wikipedia on PII:

Quote:

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Personally Identifiable Information (PII), as used in information security, refers to information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person or can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a single individual.

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Combined with other sources, e.g. legit data that relates the UDID to a user for example coming from a different case where the user consented to collection of his data, would allow AdWhirl to identify the user here.

This makes every application using TapJoyAds tracking software, with the classification changing to spyware if the customer is on informed about the use of TapJoyAds and the data TapJoyAds collects.