A while ago, I was extolling the virtues of my Android smartphone. I have to say, I am still pleased with the unit, having a mini-computer/camera/phone/calculator etc is handy. It makes life easy to find a needed part on Mouser.com, order it and get it the next day. I can snap a picture of something and send to somebody in less than a minute. When trouble shooting a transmitter, sending a picture to the factory rep cuts down on the back and forth and brings the effort directly to the point.
I have also blogged about my mediocre Pandora experience. Now, it seems there is another reason to be weary of the mighty Pandora machine.
The Wall Street Journal has a good article about what these companies are doing with your data.
Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks.
Read the whole thing, it is enlightening.
Is my Smartphone spying on me? Apparently so. Frankly, I’ve had enough of this. There is nothing compelling or even terribly unique about Pandora. I’ve found the Pandora listening experience to be adequate, but certainly not worth all the hoopla it gets. Being constantly bombarded by advertisers selling all sorts of garbage is becoming annoying. I’ve gone through and deleted all apps that access personal data of any kind, including Pandora. There are a few which are hard rooted in the phone such as Skype mobile and Facebook which can’t be deleted. Skype mobile can’t even be deactivated, as soon as the program is ended, it restarts on it’s own.
So, is Skype mobile recording everything I do and sending to some black hole somewhere? I don’t know. If it is, it is likely boring somebody half to death as most of my life is pretty mundane.
Update: I rooted my phone, which was far easier than I thought it would be, and deleted all the programs I didn’t like.