good, it’s already bad enough with SMS spammers.

IANAL so I’m asking
Would the plaintiff have to show intent?
Is it enough to {presumably} violate the law, or would it have to be shown that they deliberately ordered the programmer to put the code in the game for the purpose of collecting #s.

Intent? How can you “accidentally” harvest phone numbers? You have to use a certain bit of code to do it, then send it to a server. I read elsewhere that using monitoring tools, some users could see where the apps were actually sending phone numbers to the Storm8 servers. Looks like pretty clear intent to me. IANAL either, but I don’t think that damage has to occur, either, to be guilty of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Just accessing a computer without permission is enough, from what I understand. Besides, the stealing of a person’s phone number, it could be argued, is damage.

Besides, the stealing of a person’s phone number, it could be argued, is damage.

I agree completely. This was a reprehensible thing to do. I’m just wondering if Storm8 could argue in court that “the programmer set this up without our knowledge and we removed it as soon as we became aware of it”. If that would work then it would make a pretty huge loophole in the law.