If you use Pandora's Android app, beware: Pandora's channeling your personal info to third party advertisers, including your birthdate, gender, Android ID, and GPS information.

Evidence for this first appeared in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, which reported that the company was one of many smartphone app manufacturers under investigation for allegedly obtaining and distributing information about users illegally to third parties (In fact, Pandora has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury on the subject), which led security firm Veracode to investigate further and uncover some disturbing information:

[Y]our personal information is being transmitted to advertising agencies in mass quantities... In isolation some of this data is uninteresting, but when compiled into a single unifying picture, it can provide significant insight into a persons life. Consider for a moment that your current location is being tracked while you are at your home, office, or significant other's house. Couple that with your gender and age and then with your geolocated IP address. When all that is placed into a single basket, it's pretty easy to determine who someone is, what they do for a living, who they associate with, and any number of other traits about them.

Veracode identified five separate ad libraries that received information from Pandora's app, and believes that a user's GPS information, birthday, gender, IP address, and postal code are transmitted to these libraries, along with information about the app and device themselves. Pandora has, in the past, argued that the information is necessary to craft personalized music streams, but when contacted about this latest information by Ars Technica, the company declined to comment.

Note I've seen this trend happening more now with even my own tablet's. I had install free voice phone feature. Not only did I not set it up but I get an email via my gmail telling me I had a phone number already to to use 503 area code. I said what I never setup anything like that. Looks when you install the app and first launch it it sends data to the app home site and they set everything up. Then create phone number for your tablet and then keep on emailing me saying you have use your phone number yet in 14 days then by 30 days it tells me they will cut me off. I never use the app nor did I care about it. But this is what's going on with these apps.

Then you have: Ad by Admob another one appears are every free app you have. Blocking it has been a challenge. Then there is the store.thq is another one when you play Angry Birds Rio has appeared. All this junk thrown in our faces every day. The FCC has started a investigation into all this ads and our privacy on these devices.

The collection of your personal data is not open for bidding on the current ad chain market. But it seems it is. We need more privacy app controls. The generic browser in the tablet needs better protection. Just like it's big brother you have so much protection. I would like to see Opt Out feature, more adblocking (I do that now with my ROMs since last year 2010 and current)