This is a really rather strange decision by Apple, to pull the app "Clueful" from the Apps Store. It's rather difficult to think of any benign reason for it.
Bitdefender, the Romanian anti-virus company, created an app called Clueful, which looks at what your various apps themselves look at. Do they access your address book for example, your GPS location information and so on? This was approved by Apple and went into the Apps Store. Now it has been withdrawn again.
An app that told iPhone users whether their other apps were breaching data privacy has been removed from Apple's store in mysterious circumstances.
Clueful would say if your other programmes were accessing your address book, tracking your GPS co-ordinates or farming information from social networking accounts.
Neither Apple nor the app's developers, Romanian-based Bitdefender, have revealed why, after just two months, the program has been pulled.
Now why would they do that? We'd all be rather interested in who has access to such information, wouldn't we? As Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out, the number of apps that do access information we probably don't know they're accessing is large:
Bitdefender took a look at over 65,000 apps and discovered that tens of thousands of apps were specifically programmed to raid address books and upload the data. Of the apps that access address book data, over 40 percent of them don’t encrypt any data collected, which means that personal information is sent over WiFi and cellular data connections in plain text format that anyone could intercept and read.
It’s not just address books that apps are raiding. 41 percent of apps tested use the location services feature to track user’s whereabouts, although users can use the settings in iOS to control this.
There are obvious advantages to Apple's walled garden approach to apps. It significantly reduces the possibility of malicious code being inserted for example. But it also seems to have its downside as well: apps that reveal things that Apple would prefer unrevealed seem not to be allowed. It's an interesting practical question. How much such control are we happy with Apple having? What's the correct balance between their power protecting us and their power protecting them?
