Yesterday we posted about a developer who made an interesting blog post picking apart the most common iPhone passcodes. How did he get his data? He harvested the codes from an app he created called “Big Brother Camera Security,” which took a photo of anyone trying to use your phone. It turns out the developer was anonymously — and without permission — recording people’s passcodes. While he released this information with the best of intentions — namely getting people to use better protection — us and some others were a bit worried about the fact that he gathere d this info at all.
Now we’ve heard that his app has been pulled from the app store. Even though he was only gathering from his own app, Apple banned his app for “surreptitiously harvesting user passwords.”
There seems to be a lot of misinformation about what he actually did wrong, and he’s fighting the ban. While I can’t say I’m comfortable with him taking the passcodes from his own app, in no way is he gathering those from people’s actual lock screens. At the very least, he released the info in a white hat manner, and did so for the public good.
What do our readers think? Should the app be banned for anonymously harvesting passwords? Or is that within the rights of a developer?
[via BGR]
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