The Data Collection Capabilities of Third-Party iOS Developers

The world of technology is changing. It used to be one where users could post on social media, order clothes online, and play mobile games without a care in the world. As time progressed, companies eventually realized that they could collect small pieces of information from a user’s technological habits, and use that to form a profile of the user of some sort. Such a profile could be used for marketing, grouping, or even just to sell-off. I conducted a study of mobile device application developers, specifically relating to iOS third-party applications. This is more of a hidden loophole in the “security” of Apple’s iOS. This is important to the field of data privacy because many users use third-party applications without the knowledge of what data is being taken and when it is being taken. I used a packet-monitoring service to listen in on third-party applications and wrote a script to filter out relevant pieces of data that were being sent back to an application’s server. The findings of this study concluded that third-party iOS applications have unmonitored power to access pieces of information like contacts, location, and emails.