Up until a couple of days ago, iPhone owners were singing the praises of one particular app called Aurora Feint.

For those of you who haven’t been frequenting the Apps Store over the last week or so, Aurora Feint is a puzzle RPG that is, well was, available from the apps store for free. You stack up blocks of the same colour, match

Unfortunately it seems the game has been pulled from the store amid fears that it’s community feature could be considered a security issue.

We think this is just a case of good intentions gone awry. Developers figured it would be a cool feature to let you know automatically which of your friends are also playing the game. Only problem is, once Aurora Feint has gone through your contacts, it then sends the information unencrypted to the AF server. This raised a few eyebrows late last week and sure enough, yesterday the developers posted a message on the Aurora Feint forums saying Apple had removed the application from the store and detailed exactly what was going on.

“When we discovered that the Apple SDK allowed us to look through your contact list we thought it would be a great idea to automatically show you which friends are playing the game. Why automatically? Well, everyone always complains about the keyboard on the iPhone and how annoying it is to type on it. So we thought, "Hey, why don’t we make this feature REALLY easy to use – no typing!" And such, the community feature was born. Some people have said that it would have been ok if we had a better notice explaining what was going on. I agree! We weren’t trying to be sneaky about how this worked. It was just overlooked. No one we showed it to even asked a question about it – nor did we. It just simply never came up as a potential issue when we beta tested the game with early users.”

The developers go on to say that they have modified the community feature to ensure it uses HTTPS to send your data over the wire encrypted and say it is in the queue and marked as “In Review” and should be back up and running soon.

If you’ve been playing Aurora Feint let us know how you feel about your data being sent around unencrypted. Many people are saying they’ll be deleting the application and not reinstalling it. What about you? Let us know in the comments section below.