Aurora Feint removed from App Store [Update: Back in place]

Aurora Feint, the free and popular iPhone game, has been removed from the App Store due to privacy concerns over its community feature, which allowed users to see which of their friends were playing the game at the same time. The concern surrounds the fact that Aurora Feint uploads your entire contacts list, unencrypted, to the developer’s server.

There was no malicious intent involved; having your contacts uploaded was just easier than typing in your friends’ data by hand, according to Danielle Cassley, one of the game’s developers. Casserly claims that they “… weren’t trying to be sneaky about how this worked,” and that a notification message of some sort was “… just overlooked.”

Details on the problem and, now, the subsequent fix, after the break.