These third parties collect information that allows them to keep intricate histories of your behavior, and use it to make money from you in ways you might not expect or even see. This includes game apps as innocuous if obnoxious-seeming as Angry Birds and its descendants, like Fruit Ninja (by the Australia-based Halfbrick Studios) and Candy Crush (by Malta-based developer King). Though it doesn’t often come up and is confusing to think through, almost every app on your phone is full of third-party advertising intermediaries - at a minimum, ad software owned by Facebook or Twitter or Google, but often a couple dozen other companies you haven’t even heard of, as well. (Researchers at Georgetown University and NYU recently named it one of the least trusted American institutions, across political parties.) If the tactics of even the largest, most public, most well-documented violator of our privacy are a black box to the average person, what do most of us know about the tactics of, say, a Finnish game developer? It was a Trojan horse - the first colorful, fun, utterly unthreatening game that was downloaded onto a billion phones, and the start of a decade of downloading free apps without having any real idea what they were getting from us.Ī Pew study published this January found that 76 percent of Americans knew basically nothing about Facebook’s tracking and targeting policies, even though other research shows that most people understand that they shouldn’t trust the company. It’s not the only mobile game that’s sucked away intimate information, and it’s not the worst offender, but it was the first global hit. Angry Birds is still part of your life.Īs the first wildly successful mobile game, it’s an avatar for the way our understanding of what’s private and what’s personal has collapsed in the past decade. “I haven’t played Angry Birds since 2012, at the latest,” you might insist.
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