[riquito]

You make it sound like there are a couple minor bugs. What about the addresses of the users sent away? "only accessible for authenticated users": which means everyone.

From the home page "Play against friends in real time": this is a false advertising at best. Also, is it written anywhere that people can play against bots?

"We're sorry" would have been a better start

[ddoolin]

I don't understand how that's false advertising at all. I definitely have played with friends in real time, many times. That's just not the ONLY case.

I think most users with half of a brain can figure out that not all matches are real time. If you challenge a friend, it clearly tells you that you can play the match without them and they can play against "you" when they get around to it.

A really acknowledging response was given -- would those words really make that much of a difference?

[jokull]

We are very sorry for not treating our users’ private information more carefully.

In QuizUp you are playing a human in real time in almost every game. In the off chance we cannot find an opponent (which is becoming very rare due to our popularity) you may be pitted against a bot as a fallback strategy. Matchmaking is a hard technical problem, and we have chosen to maximize gameplay experience and consistency. I’m happy to share that the ratio of ghost games to real ones is getting very small! Hopefully we will be able to phase them out completely in the future.

[alandarev]

Good catch. Sadly the "We are sorry" for being careless reminds me of a "BP - we are sorry" incident.

There is no cost for a faceless company to be 'sorry', and only prmotes the further unethical actions by other companies. I would rather see them pay the fine for privacy breach.

Moreover, this all goes down to the apps requiring ALL permissions to run, why is that acceptable? Why is QuizUp allowed to see user's location in first place?

To me, it feels like making stalker's life easier than ever. Make an app displaying cats, set it require full permissions, put on App Store.

[jokull]

Geo coordinates are acquired from user via the iOS location permission. It is persisted in an ElasticSearch index for the "Nearby" leaderboard.