iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad applications using MobClix

[PepiMK]

Why applications using MobClix might be called Tracking Software or Spyware

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

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

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

GET /?i=12345678-1234-1234-1234-12345678901234&s=320x50&p=iphone&v=4.1.6&u=1234567890123456789012345678901234567890&dt=iPhone2_1%204.0&sv=4.0&l=de_DE&ap=0&o=0&ct=wifi&av=1.7.2&mcc=262&mnc=02&co=de HTTP/1.1
Host: ads.mobclix.com
Accept-Encoding: gzip
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: de-de
Connection: keep-alive

Now lets take a look at Wikipedia on PII:

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.

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 MobClix to identify the user here.