New Apple Developer TOS

In early June, Apple changed it’s developers Terms of Service. Here’s the important jargon:

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect, use, or disclose to any third party, user or device data without prior user consent, and then only under the following conditions:

– The collection, use or disclosure is necessary in order to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application. For example, without Apple’s prior written consent, You may not use third party analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party for aggregation, processing, or analysis.

– The collection, use or disclosure is for the purpose of serving advertising to Your Application; is provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads (for example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent); and the disclosure is limited to UDID, user location data, and other data specifically designated by Apple as available for advertising purposes.

So what’s this mean? User consent is explicitly required for the collection, use, or disclosure of any "user or device data" to third parties. If the reason for disclosure to a third party is advertising realted, then the third party must be primarily a mobile ad business. The new TOS elaborates further by explicitly excluding distributors and developers of mobile devices and operating systems. Right now, only one player is obviosuly excluded: Google. Google’s AdMob cannot collect data from Apple’s devices because they’re owned by Google who developes mobile operating systems. Companies like Mobclix are also affected since they can’t get bought by an HP, Nokia, or Microsoft anymore.

But is Apple being too agressive on this one? Check out a pissed off Jobs getting ready for battle and comment below:

[Originally published By Andrew Bellay on aonetwork.com]