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Angry Birds developer denies sending user data to marketers

No fowl play here

Angry Birds developer denies sending user data to marketers
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| Angry Birds

Rovio Mobile, developer of fowl-flinging physics puzzler Angry Birds, has denied surreptitiously sapping user data for nefarious needs, and says it isn’t passing on any important information to advertisers.

Earlier this week, a Wall Street Journal investigation accused app makers of nicking phone numbers, passwords, and other personally identifiable info about users of popular games and apps like Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, and Tweetdeck. They then pass on these sensitive names and numbers to marketers, in direct violation of Apple’s rules.

But Rovio has spoken out, telling Develop that it runs no adverts on the iOS edition of Angry Birds, and the only places its data goes is to social gaming platform Crystal and analytical service Flurry. Neither of which needs or stores sensitive data like phone numbers of passwords.

The data sent out to these two trackers is of no risk to users, says Rovio, and simply allows the developer to get a better understanding of things like what devices people are using, to make better decisions for quality and scalability.

Rovio claims the WSJ article was “vague enough to instigate mistrust in our users”.

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer