It seems that high scores aren’t the only thing being shared when you fling colourful birds at green pigs. The latest revelations to come out of the NSA privacy scandal shows that both the NSA and its UK counterpart, the GCHQ have been developing capabilities to siphon user data from smartphone apps. The like of Rovio’s successful Angry Birds is mentioned by name according to a new batch of top secret documents from the Edward Snowden cache.

The data collection is pervasive with the GCHQ boasting that they were able to extract a host of information from mobile apps by targeting the profiles built up of each user by the mobile advertising services that were embedded within the apps. The advertising services specifically mentioned  are those of Millennial Media, Burstly and even Google’s own Google ad services are said to have been compromised.

According to the documents the NSA and GCHQ can extract varying amounts of information depending on which advertiser was targeted but in all cases the list of data that could be extracted is worrying. Current location (including country of residence), age, gender, postal code, martial status (options included “single”, “married”, “divorced”, “swinger” and more), income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education level, and number of children are listed as available data sets.

The documents even claim to have been able to intercept requests from smartphones to Google Maps effectively giving the agencies location data with near pinpoint accuracy. It was so successul that one of the leaked documents boasted that “[i]t effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system.”

Rovio was quick to dismiss any involvement and released a statement on its website last night distancing itself from the allegations by reminding everyone that it is not Angry Birds being targeted but rather the third party ad network hat it uses. Rovio’s CEO, Mikael Hed, even went so far as to say that he would “have to re-evaluate working” with the ad networks in the future to protect the privacy of users.

“Rovio Entertainment Ltd, which is headquartered in Finland, does not share data, collaborate or collude with any government spy agencies such as NSA or GCHQ anywhere in the world.”

“Our fans’ trust is the most important thing for us and we take privacy extremely seriously. We do not collaborate, collude, or share data with spy agencies anywhere in the world. “