Tokyo-based IT company Milog is known for providing Android-based smartphone apps that let users share information about the apps installed on their phones and rank them by popularity. This small startup, established in 2009, has been supported by notable companies, including receiving a ¥310 million joint-investment from information and job-placement agency Recruit and Japan's second largest Internet advertising agency Opt.
In July, they released a variety of apps under the name "App.tv," which packages TV dramas by series into an Android app for each show. The apps are for free in exchange for information from the users' phones. Milog also distribute "AppLog library," which tracks users' app information and pays third-party developers ¥1 per each install, if other the developers include "AppLog" in their own apps. This provides Milog with information on end users that can be sold to, for example, advertising companies that can create targeted ads based on what they know about the end user's usage habits.
For this kind of business, it is essential that users explicitly agree to being tracked, and until recently this was the case. However, users have begun to report that they were not asked for their permission, or were asked with very vague text. Engineers, such as blogger Nobuo Sakiyama and a security/privacy-issue researcher, Hiromitsu Takagi, then analyzed internal communications of users' phones and found that in fact "App.tv" had been sending information about which applications were used by people every hour even without approval.