Pandora Radio consists of a music service by streaming personalized according to your tastes. What it does is offer personalized radio stations over the Internet; user suggests song name and page generates a radio station with a music list similar to the one requested in the consultation (for legal reasons the requested song is not played immediately). The user has the possibility of marking the songs as to their liking or dislike and personalizing their stations. You can also propose a new song. Very similar to Last.fm.
Also Pandora Radio It has a free application for Android (1.5 or higher) in the Market, with more than 10 million installations.
The news has jumped because Pandora has been summoned to testify before a United States Federal Jury, and is being investigated for collecting personal data from mobile phone users and then forwarding it to the servers of different online advertising agencies.
La computer security company Veracode carried out an analysis of several applications for smartphones (Android and iOS) and discovered that it used five advertising agency libraries, among which code was used to obtain personal data from users. The library in question is AdMob, and the stolen information is:
- - The geographical location by GPS.
- - Altitude and orientation.
- - sex.
- - The birthdate.
- - Postal Code.
- - Android ID.
- - Status of the connection.
- - Network Information.
- - Trademarks Of the device.
- - Model.
- - Demo reel.
- - Address IP.
The sending of the location by GPS is updated periodically. The destination address is as follows: .
For those who are curious to see the code of that library that collects that data and forwards it, you can follow this link.
Pandora argues that it needs this user data to be able to provide the personalized streaming music service to each one.
However, Veracode, after analyzing the code, has made it clear that Pandora does not use this data for its own service but to transfer it to third companies for advertising purposes.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, Veracode
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