NSA spying on Angry Birds, other smartphone apps

This video from the USA says about itself:

NSA Violated Surveillance Rules Thousands of Times, Intercepted All 202 Area Code Calls By Accident.

From the New York Times in the USA:

Spy Agencies Scour Phone Apps for Personal Data

By JAMES GLANZ, JEFF LARSON and ANDREW W. LEHREN

JAN. 27, 2014

When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies may be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents.

In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism suspects and other targets, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications: With each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can pick it up.

According to dozens of previously undisclosed classified documents, among the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew everything from users’ smartphone identification codes to where they have been that day.

The N.S.A. and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were working together on how to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps by 2007, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor. Since then, the agencies have traded recipes for grabbing location and planning data when a target uses Google Maps, and for vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, phone logs and the geographic data embedded in photos when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services.

From daily The Guardian in Britain:

NSA and GCHQ target ‘leaky’ phone apps like Angry Birds to scoop user data

• US and UK spy agencies piggyback on commercial data
• Details can include age, location and sexual orientation
• Documents also reveal targeted tools against individual phones

James Ball

Monday 27 January 2014 17.30 GMT

NSA Infiltrates Angry Birds to Spy on Phone Apps: here.

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• Are your apps spying on you? claims NSA are using ‘leaky apps’ from Angry Birds to Google Maps to gather data
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• NSA can spy on Angry Birds users: report