Henrik Kettunen/Bloomberg
‘Angry Birds’ is one of several apps that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, use to collect users’ information.
These “Angry Birds” are telling more about you than you may know.
The National Security Agency uses the popular smartphone app — with an estimated 1.7 billion downloads worldwide — to take information ranging from a user’s age and location to their sexual orientation, The Guardian newspaper reported, using documents provided by notorious leaker Edward Snowden.
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The latest revelations show how the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ, use “leaky” smartphone apps to absorb data from some of the most popular apps, including Google Maps, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and LinkedIn, the New York Times reported in collaboration with The Guardian.
Since 2007, the agencies have used the apps to grab the information, including users’ political affiliation, to find out things like “Where was my target when they did this?” and “Where is my target going?” the Times reported.
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A May 2010 NSA slide on the agency's 'perfect scenario' for obtaining data from mobile apps.
One NSA slide from a 2010 presentation on data mining is headlined “Golden Nugget!” and describes a “perfect scenario” where a “target" is "uploading photo to a social media site taken with a mobile device.”
“What can we get?” the slide implores of its agents.
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Much of the information is similar to cookies used by websites and advertising agencies to track a consumer's Internet and smartphone app habits.
That data flows to NSA data centers in droves, the newspapers report.
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Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras/AP
Edward Snowden leaked the latest batch of documents, which show how the NSA uses smartphone data to track users' latest moves and gather information on them, down to sexual orientation.
"They are gathered in bulk, and are currently our single largest type of events," a top-secret GCHQ document reportedly says.
The agencies do point to the data mining as leading to some success in disrupting terrorism, including an Al Qaeda bomb plot in 2007 in Germany, where the NSA used emails and web traffic to follow the plotters. And a similar use led to the arrest of drug cartel members accused of killing an American Consulate employee in Mexico in 2010, the Times reported.
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But the data is so massive and broad that it can become too much for analysts. One month of NSA-collected cellphone data in 2009 led to more than 8.6 million callers of interest. Three months of British GCHQ information turned up more than 24.7 million callers of interest.
“Not necessarily straightforward,” a top-secret report said of the analysis, the Times reported.
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