Mom (knocking): What are you doing in that bathroom?
Pandora: Leave me alone. I’m, uh… I’m just sorting through people’s musical preferences.
Mom: You better not being sending out people’s personal information in there. Don’t think I don’t know about those advertisers you keep under your bed!
If you don’t have a smart phone, then you are probably a) ostracized by society and b) unaware of the Pandora radio app that allows users to create their own stations based on their musical preferences, which then leads to other tracks being recommended by related artists. To use the app, users must submit their age and gender information.
According to Hypebot, Veracode — an application security company based out of Burlington, MA — opened Pandora’s box recently when they decided to look into the program’s inner workings following the revelation in an initial public offering (IPO) filing that a grand jury was investigating smart phone apps like Pandora.
The team at Veracode is responsible for analyzing programs such as Pandora to search for security flaws. Veracode discovered that Pandora’s iPhone and Android apps have been transmitting user age, location, gender, and other unique identifiers to advertisers. The names of the advertisers who received this information have not yet been given. However, we now know that advertisers not only know that you created a Rebecca Black station, but they can envision precisely where you were when you created it.
