Recently Apple has banned around 250 apps from the app store on the grounds that they were gathering personal information on their users without the user’s knowledge. These apps were mainly from a Chinese development company called Youmi who put out these apps with codes to gather personal information which Apple and other developers were unaware of. As a result, Apple has pulled all the apps that were put out by this developer from the Apple App store citing that it breached the company’s policy when it comes to Apps. Apple has also stated that they will reject any future apps coming from Youmi before they can get in the App Store to prevent any more information being gathered. I personally agree with Apple’s decision to pull these apps from the store and keep any other Youmi apps from being available.

In the world we live in today, the idea of gathering personal information anonymously has been a subject of controversy and has risen to mainstream attention after the 2013 NSA Spying incident. Many people, including myself, were outraged with this discovery including me and as a result there has been a huge backlash against private information against people gathering information anonymously. This lead to a lot of reform about gathering information from not only government agencies but also from organizations such as Apple.

Now taking that information and applying it to today, Apple has made it part of their company policy for those who develop apps that they cannot gather personal information on the app’s users. I believe that Apple was in the right to pull these apps from the app store because if they didn’t and this information got out, there would be a lot of backlash from Apple and it would incredibly hurt sales/support from consumers for Apple products.

Another reason I support Apple’s decision to ban these apps is that you never know who could be gathering the information. This time it was a company in China who was gathering the information but what was their reason for doing so? There could be a variety of reasons that they were but we don’t know why. It could’ve been something as simple as trying to personalize the apps to the user, all the way to something such as the company trying to commit identity theft. Now that these apps are gone, they cannot continue to gather information on users which means that if this company was committing an act such as identity theft, they will not be able to anymore, at least not on Apple products.

With these apps gone from the app store, Apple users can start to feel safer knowing that apps that are going to gather information anonymously are not allowed in the store anymore. Now users don’t have to worry about what app they download and after downloading any app, they don’t have to wonder if there personal information is being gathered by a third party for various reasons.

By pulling these apps, Apple has also shown that they will not give in and stick by their policies when it comes to apps. They show that if someone is violating their company policies in ways like this, they will get on it and make sure that it does not happen again. This could not only keep their customers from buying Apple’s products, but with policies like these, they may even win over consumers who are mainly supporters of other smartphone and tablet products such as Samsung and Droid. These two companies haven’t stated any policies against apps that are gathering personal information so some consumers that may want to play it safe may end up switching to Apple after learning of this policy.