‘Company finds customer phone numbers via free iPhone app’

The Swiss company Mogo is said to have called users of its free iPhone application to promote the paid version of the software. With a line of code, applications can find out the phone number of the iPhone.

The Swiss application MogoRoad provides users with real-time traffic information on their iPhone. However, the app’s creator, Mogo, would call users of the free application out of the blue to ask if they would like to upgrade to a paid version, reports the French-language Apple news site Mac4ever. The users of the app would not have given permission to use private data.

Finding out the phone number of an iPhone owner is not difficult. Ars Technica described earlier this year already that the telephone number is stored openly in a file with settings. That string, located in /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist, can be read and the information forwarded to a remote server. The only line of code a developer needs to put in their app is: CFShow([[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@”SBFormattedPhoneNumber”]); Apple has not yet commented on the matter.

It is not the first time that the iPhone has been discredited in connection with the use of privacy-sensitive data by application builders. Some time ago, it turned out that many apps are forwarding data. Among the data collected is the iPhone’s unique ID number, location, software version, and firmware version. Many developers use that info to improve their application and to keep statistics of the use of their software.