Super-fun puzzle game, Aurora Feint may have been pulled from the iTunes App Store for grabbing a little more personal info from your iPhone than you may be aware of.
Gizmodo reports that Apple pulled the app citing privacy and security issues. The app goes through your contacts list and sends unencrypted data back to their servers to match you up with friends playing at the same time. Yeah, unencrypted, not so good.
The Aurora Feint developers state they don't know why their game is missing from the App Store.
"I would like to clarify that we do not know why our application was removed from the store. We submitted an update hours before being delisted. Apple has not contacted us and their policy is to contact developers when an app is removed. It's possible there is a bug in their update system. We have been trying to figure out a way to contact someone at Apple who can give us more information. All media reports that we were removed due to "lousy security practices" are pure speculation."
They also touched on the privacy concerns of players:
"I would also like to add that as soon as we realized we were becoming popular we deleted all personal information from our servers in preparation for releasing a secure update. Even if you are currently playing the game and type in your info, we do not store it. In other words, the community feature has been disabled since Friday, July 18th."
"We would like to clarify that your contact list was not, is not, and never will be stored on our servers. The only data we stored is what you typed in on the community page so other people could find you."
The developers added the "community feature" so players could find friends immediately without typing your friends names into input fields.
The developers explain that they didn't intend to steal your identity, run off to Vegas and marry the first show girl they came across on their site.
"In the 1.0 version of the game we just didn't get around to doing everything we wanted to do in time for the launch: remember we tried to do a high quality game in 10 weeks flat. So, if you opt-in to the community feature, when you refresh your friends, the data is sent unencrypted to our web servers. Before you freak out though, let me explain why this was done. We just thought that it was a cool feature and that we'd implement security stuff if we became popular. To that end, the web server we launched with was a teeny box with almost no power. We spent the first few days scrambling to scale our servers. We really had no idea how popular we were going to be. We added this feature in near the end of our development cycle and simply decided that we didn't have enough time to spend to make it secure in advance of knowing if it was even going to be a hit."
The developers are asking their customers what is the best way to rectify the situation. You can toss in your two-cents in their forum.
