Jailbreak News: The Evad3rs Address TaiG Privacy And Piracy Concerns

The Evad3rs have been under a lot of pressure lately. After the team released the iOS 7 untethered jailbreak, piracy and privacy concerns became the main topics of discussion rather than the actual jailbreak. The Evad3rs initially made a deal with the company behind TaiG, allowing the third party app store to be installed during the jailbreak process if the user's language was set to Chinese. Unfortunately, TaiG happens to contain a wide variety of pirated apps and tweaks. Along with that, users were concerned that TaiG was tracking private user data. Don't panic though, according to the Evad3rs, TaiG wasn't up to anything sneaky with your data. Though, the piracy issue was big enough of a concern for the jailbreak team to cancel the entire deal. Here's the entire statement from the Evad3rs' website:

Dear Jailbreak Community (part 2), We want to address some additional concerns put forth by the community: Privacy and Taig First and foremost, and of utmost concern, is privacy. No one's data was ever sent anywhere. Of course, as a member of the community whose work frees devices, it would be against everything we've worked for the last 7 years to jeopardize the security of the users of our software. To reiterate, no Taig software was installed unless the computer's language was set to Chinese. Furthermore, no Taig software would run unless the user opened the Taig application. After rumors abound of encrypted data being sent for users in China who've installed Taig, we decided to do what we do best - reverse engineer the code of Taig to understand what was being sent. Taig transmitted data similar to what Cydia transmits. Unique device identifiers were transmitted in encrypted form similar to how Cydia uses SSL to protect the privacy of its users. Taig did not transmit any private user data from the devices at all. Piracy and Taig Our written and verbal agreement with Taig banned it. They assured us it was not in there. We did not check every package in their store but a cursory examination before release found no problems. However, after investigation and after notification from the community, we found examples, including pirated tweaks, Apple App Store apps, and even pod2g's PodDJ app. We dropped the ball on this. While we at first did not believe Taig purposefully violated our agreement, the depth of the transgression against the software developers and the jailbreak community cannot be overlooked and we could not move forward after that even if it were fixed. We terminated our relationship with them. We are very disappointed that they have decided to put up a cracked version of the jailbreak on their site that installs Taig. We did not give them any permission or source code. We have refused all monies from Taig There have been a lot of rumors listing various amounts we’ve been paid. We have received no monies from any group, including Taig. We will not be accepting any money. Our donations are being given to Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure to help protect jailbreaking as your legal right. Jailbreak Updates We are working hard to fix the problems with the jailbreak. Unfortunately, it's the holidays and we would like to spend time with our friends and family. The events of the last couple of days have been extremely stressful for us and we need some time to recover. We will work as hard as we can to resolve any remaining issues. Thank you for your understanding. We worked very hard to bring this jailbreak free of charge to the community. We hope you can all enjoy it. evad3rs

In my opinion, it was a bad idea to get a large financial deal involved with this jailbreak release. I understand that everyone needs to make a living, but I'd rather pay the Evad3rs for their hard work than worry about sour deals with shady third party app stores. I truly believe that the Evad3rs had good intentions. As the statement mentions, TaiG even contained a pirated version of Pod2g's PodDJ app. I highly doubt Pod2g would be okay with the illegal distribution of his own work. Either way, I think we should all move past this drama. Everyone is doing their part to keep the jailbreak scene alive and steps have been taken to ensure that Evasi0n7 is piracy-free and secure. I'm very grateful for the work that has been done to bring us an untethered iOS 7 jailbreak and I think that the Evad3rs handled the situation in a profession manner. If you'd like to check out the new iOS 7 jailbreak for yourself, we've put together a detailed video tutorial to walk you through the process. For more iOS 7 jailbreak coverage, check out these articles: Goodbye TaiG: The Evasi0n7 Jailbreak Tool Has Been Updated, Cydia Has Been Updated With A New Design For iOS 7, and This iOS 7 Jailbreak Tweak Will Enable Hidden Springboard Settings.

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