Stefan Mileschin

One of the dafter spying moves from Her Majesty's Secret Service included monitoring users' Angry Birds games.

Quite what James Bond would learn from your High Score is anyone's guess, but it is more that the apps tend to leak data and that could be interesting to the spooks.

The New York Times took time out of its busy schedule of praising Apple to release some more of the intelligence documents given to it by Edward Snowden. It claimed the UK Government Communications Headquarters, had tried to exploit increasing volumes of personal data that spill onto networks from new generations of mobile phone technology.

One of these new intelligence tools were "leaky" apps on smartphones that could disclose users' locations, age, gender and other personal information.

The US and British agencies were working together on ways to collect and store data from smartphone apps by 2007.

The agencies have traded methods for collecting location data from a user of Google Maps and for gathering address books, friend lists, phone logs and geographic data embedded in photos when a user posts to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services, the Times said.

The Times report said the scale of the data collection from smartphones was not clear but the documents showed that the two national agencies routinely obtained information from certain apps, including some of the earliest ones introduced to mobile phones.

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