No!! Can hear it? It’s the sound of my world crumbling. My favorite app! Not my favorite app!
Okay, I’ve collected myself. So what’s the problem? Well, it turns out Aurora Feint has some serious security issues. Nothing malicious, mind you, but a security threat, nonetheless. In order to keep track of other players online, the game uploads your entire contact list to the server. However, this transfer of your data occurs unencrypted–which poses a big risk to your personal information.
After discovering the security hole, Apple removed the game from their App Store. But now it seems the game is back in the review stage after the developers added HTTPS in order to encrypt data.
What I want to know has to do with the version of the game that’s still on my iPhone. I never opted into the community feature, but how will Apple deal with those that still play the unencrypted version? Will a reinstall take care of it?
[via Just Another iPhone Blog]
Hello! Let’s get back to the part where my “entire contact list” was just uploaded to their server. What the hell is that about??!!
This has been exaggerated all over the web and blown WAY out of proportion. *Nothing at all* was uploaded to their server unless you specifically enabled the Community feature, entered your own email address and phone number, and pressed the “Find your friends” button. If you did all of these things, then and *only then* was your data sent to the server to query, and then PROMPTLY DELETED. The only data being stored was your own info which you entered yourself – email and phone #.
Of course, if you never used the Community feature in this game, then nothing at all was sent. If you did, then you surely would have had some idea that you were transmitting data, as you had to enter and send it yourself. In any event, none of this information was stored anywhere except locally on your own phone.
Aurora Feint was a great game, one I still play. I was pretty bummed after writing up a review on tiltgamer to find it removed from the app store. I hope this set back doesn’t detour the developers, they really seemed to be on to something with this game.
It’s back on the app store, with the full support of Apple!
http://aurorafeint.proboards100.com/index.cgi?board=world&action=display&thread=369