Many a month might have passed since the two parties last traded blows, but it would appear accusations made by Apple that Flurry's business violated consumer privacy back in June have left a mark.

In a lengthy post on Flurry's blog, company president and CEO Simon Khalaf has set out why he believes the firm's analytics business – which now reaches 100 million unique devices a month, providing data to more than 35,000 companies – never crossed such a line.

What's more, though Khalaf claims Flurry respects individual consumer data, it hasn't had to sacrifice the relevance of its findings as a result.

The data on the data

"As someone who has worked in software security for 15 years and online advertising for another five, I personally appreciate both the sensitivity and the opportunity of managing this data set," Khalaf says in the entry.

"We do not know anything about the individuals behind the device upon which our customers' apps are running – not their name, physical address, phone number, email address, etc," he continues.

"Collectively, this kind of data is called 'personally identifiable information' or PII for short.  Flurry does not collect, store, buy, trade or sell PII. We never have and we never will."

Setting the record straight

It would appear Khalaf believes the questions that surrounded Flurry's business earlier in the year – set off by Apple CEO Steve Jobs claiming that the company had broken every privacy policy going by collecting and publishing usage data – have effectively smeared the company.

As a result, Khalaf takes time to point out that Flurry doesn't collect or aggregate user data – it's app data that is the company's focus.

"Flurry has played a vital role in helping increase app quality across the mobile app ecosystem, and in rare cases where some of our customers may have less than noble intentions, because we don’t collect any PII or share individual level usage statistics with them, there is nothing that can be exploited," he adds.

"In short, Flurry does not profile consumers. Rather, it profiles applications."

Angry Apple

Jobs' clash with Flurry in the summer was arguably sparked by the company's ability to track the then-unannounced iPad earlier in the year.

"One day we read in the paper that a company called Flurry Analytics has detected that we have some new iPhone and 'other tablet devices' that we're using on our campus," he said.

"Their software is sending out information about the device, about its geo-location and other things back to Flurry. They can't send data out to an analytics firm who is going to sell it to make money and publish it. That we don't need to do."

As a result, Apple outlawed certain elements of the app analytics business on iOS, though Flurry has continued to operate throughout the changes without being banned outright.

[source: Flurry]