Yesterday in our article about King and all the crap they are going through, we comments that it is always fun times in the gaming industry and apparently Rovio is having some fun times of their own. An article in the New York Times has posted that “spies could be lurking in the background to snatch data” when you open and play popular games like Angry Birds.
Obvious using Angry Birds is a good example due to the amount of downloads the game has but this has ruffled a few feathers over at Rovio who explicitly deny any sharing of personal data with the NSA or any other agency. All of this stems from leaked secret British intelligence documents, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Government Communications HQ (GCHQ) are trying to exploit so-called “leaky apps” to obtain information regarding your location, sexual orientation, and political alignment. Interesting because sexual orientation and political alignments has a lot to do with games like Angry Birds right? Right.
Of course these kinds of allegations can ruin a company so Rovio was pretty quick to issue a statement denying any sharing of data to any government agencies.
The alleged surveillance may be conducted through third-party advertising networks used by millions of commercial web sites and mobile applications across all industries. If advertising networks are indeed targeted, it would appear that no internet-enabled device that visits ad-enabled web sites or uses ad-enabled applications is immune to such surveillance. In order to protect our end users, we will, like all other companies using third-party advertising networks, have to re-evaluate working with these networks if they are being used for spying purposes. – Rovio
Rovio did say it would “re-assess its relationship with advertising services to prevent user privacy from ever being compromised” so we will most likely see some minor updates to the entire Angry Birds franchise heading our way soon.
Website Referenced: The Verge | New York Times
