Last year Edward Snowden blew the whistle on U.S. National Security Agency’s clandestine electronic spying programs. Since then he has leaked a barrage of highly classified documents revealing various programs. Yesterday, in yet another Snowden leak, documents alleged that the NSA in collaboration with UK’s GCHQ had been siphoning off personal data of users through popular mobile applications. Angry Birds was named as one of those apps in the documents, which isn’t a surprise, its been downloaded over a billion times. Today Rovio has issued a statement saying that it has never let the NSA spy on its users.
Rovio says that it does not share data or collaborate with any government spy agency including the NSA and the GCHQ. Branding the report as “speculation,” Rovio said that if the spying techniques described in the documents are true then it would appear that no device that “visits ad-enabled websites or uses ad-enabled applications is immune to such surveillance.” Rovio’s statement does not address allegations that Angry Birds app might have failed at protecting users’ personal information. The report claimed that both agencies are able to lift data such as call logs, text messages, emails and more by simply exploiting popular mobile applications, but there was nothing in the documents which hinted that the companies that develop said applications have directly collaborated with the NSA.
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