Angry Birds is so 2009, you might say. “I haven't played Angry Birds since 2012, at the latest,” you might insist. It doesn't matter. Angry Birds is still part of your life.
As the first wildly successful mobile game, it's an avatar for the way our understanding of what's private and what's personal has collapsed in the past decade. It's not the only mobile game that's sucked away intimate information, and it's not the worst offender, but it was the first global hit. It was a Trojan horse — the first colorful, fun, utterly unthreatening game that was downloaded onto a billion phones, and the start of a decade of downloading free apps without having any real idea what they were getting from us.
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