All I wanted to do was play super mario brothers dammit!

In September, I bought an Android cell phone.  I had used Palm my whole life, and I wanted to see what all the Android fuss was about.  

I use my phone as a phone.  Mostly to communicate with friends, but people kept telling me about the games, and that I should play "angry birds".   Well, I went to download this game from Android's market, but instead of searching for "Angry Birds", I searched for Super Mario Brothers.  There had to be someone that remade this classic game of my youth - the game my brother and I frequently induced bloody noses on each other's faces for and during.  

I found one and downloaded it.   I didn't pay attention to the privacy settings. 

Soon, one of my friends, who had given only a handful of people her cell phone number complained to me that she was getting telemarketing calls.  I asked her if she was on the do not call list - she said yes.  I then asked her when she started receiving the calls.  It was a weird conincidence that this happened just a few days after I downloaded the Super Mario Brothers game on my droid. 

Interested, I decided to look at what I authorized the app to use on my phone.   I was very surprised to find out that I had given the application access to my web browser, authorization to read my text messages, access to my phone, and access to all of my contacts.  

I have no idea if this company recorded my contacts and then resold them to other people, but this astonished me.  I would say this was a privacy violation, but I expressly authorized them to do all of this.  Why?  Because I wanted to play Super Mario Brothers.  

I have no idea if this app caused my friend's telemarketing issues, but it woke me up to what all an app on Android has access to.   I recently read an article that many of the Android apps are infected with some type of malware, but with privacy "holes" like this, why would you bother?  Why not just get the user to authorize big brother (like my app) and record everything?