You realize that these evil analytics engines are on the very page you're looking at, right? There are tags for Google Analytics and Quantcast on the page I'm typing on right now. To my knowledge, the MR staff are not evil corporate overlords (
though if they were. . . )
All I'm saying is that there's a difference between sending personally identifiable data (they could locate the iPhones on the Cupertino campus?!) and general, untraceable analytics data (I'll bet the MR staff could find out what device most of us use to get here) that sends useful data back to developers.
Yes - but this article, and Steve's comments are a little silly - and they're all smokescreen to place a well thought out reason for yet another restriction to the iPhone SDK - that probably has little merit as to the real reason for the changes to the agreement.
I am a developer, and I use flurry. Flurry sends completely anonymous usage statistics to their servers much like Google Analytics collects random usage data for websites. For this site, for example, the site developers can go get usage data on what versions/types of browsers are being used, what paths users are following, and YES, via IP address reverse lookup - they can also see geographically where people are coming from.
Flurry does the same for app developers. It collects information about how many people are using which versions of the OS, which devices are being used (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc), and geographically (to a maximum city/state level) where people are coming from. If you use the flurry location library, the BEST estimate you can get is a city/state of where an instance of the app was used - you can't get street level detail. Further, this is only reported if the user CHOOSES to report location. The other flurry library, without location, only reports the country the user is coming from.
In the end, I fundamentally disagree with Steve. His basic argument was that when they were testing, data was sent back to Flurry servers that said "A Device type of x is being used in Cupertino, CA" - and flurry reported on it.
Guess what Steve, your engineers are very bright - exercise their brains. You can sure tell if Flurry is being used in an app, because you can see the existance of the library in the submitted application.
It is also widely known that Flurry reports data from each session at the start of the next session, and Flurry's servers addresses are also well known. Also - a huge percentage of all mobile apps, Android, Apple, etc - all use Flurry or some other means to report this data. Flurry is one of the most trusted and NO PRIVATE information is shared via their library - just anonyous usage stats.
Rather than go off the deep end and take away valuable statistics that developers use to monitor trends, usage patterns, and devices so that they can better support their users, why don't you do the following:
- Instruct your engineers testing beta devices to always touch "Don't Allow" when a location box pops up. This prevents location reporting.
- Take the address of flurry's servers and block it from your internal wireless network that you use for testing. This would mean that even if you allowed the location, the flurry library inside of the app you are "testing" would not be able to report information back to Flurry's servers.
This is smokescreen. IMHO, Steve is pissed off (and he should be) that his engineers didn't have the forethought to make sure they were keeping their device specifics protected and he's blaming flurry. Are you seriously telling me that on Apple's own website, they are not using analytics to tell what percentage of their users are using IE, what percent are using Safari, what percent are using Firefox, and approximate geographic locations of where their users come from? This is no different. Just a hogwash pot/kettle smokescreen.
As for privacy, I would much rather a respected authority like Flurry be reporting on these statistics than some rogue developer who is also sending my address book information along with his home-brewed statistics solution... All Steve is doing is opening the door for people to start brewing their own statistics solutions that are much more in violation than just "identifying a beta device on our campus".... give me a break.
Cheers.