A few days ago we told you about an anti-virus application for Windows Phone 7 from AVG. Now Microsoft have removed it from their Marketplace following complaints from Windows Phone 7 users.

AVG appears to collect the phone make, model, a users email address and their location – AVG claim its all part of an exceptional security service.

Either way, Microsoft have pulled it and are investigated further!

This is what AVG have said:

Over the past few days, questions have been asked about AVG’s most recent mobile security product, AVG Mobilation™for Windows Phone 7.  As such, I wanted to take a moment to clarify and respond to some of the questions and comments raised in social media forums.

As soon as this product hit the market place, developers across the globe began to ask questions.  We welcome those questions as the community has a strong influence on our product designs.

Firstly, there have been questions about the features and functions of the product with some commentators feeling it is a bit light on features.

When a company designs tools to support a new product in market, there is always room for growth. Criticism and comment is natural when a product enters a new market at the early stages.

That said, we moved forward because we firmly believe a product that begins the process of securing Windows Phone 7 mobile devices is a step in the right direction.  We made this decision based on our key findings from our very successful security software for the Android mobile platform.

Three years ago, we were first to market with a security solution for Android®.  At the time, the number of threats against the Android OS was very small.

We knew however that, like the PC market, as Android grew in popularity so would the threats against the platform.

Today our security software scans 594,892,025 SMS’s a month, finding 783,963 of them as bad/spam, we also scan over 157 million App packages a month and find 225,034 are infected with malware.

AVG believes that the Windows Phone 7 OS will continue to increase in popularity and, as it does, it will become a high value target for thieves and hackers.

For this reason, we made a strategic decision to deliver a security product to this platform in its very early days – as we did with Android.  Our objective is to start Windows mobile users off on the right foot and help them create a safe and secure community.

Over time, AVG will continue to develop our product’s capabilities and believe that our user base will benefit from the investments we make in product improvement.

We worked closely with Microsoft on the development of this product.  Our teams were trained by Microsoft and our software was provided to the company for review and certification prior to release. We did implement a number of requested changes provided to us by Microsoft.

Some of the current key features of our Windows Phone 7 security software include the utilization of several protection engines for both Web security and file security.

The Safe Web Surfing function helps protect users from social engineering attacks that are intended to drive them to take wrong decisions while online.

This protection engine checks the safety of a URL in case the user tries to access a malicious web site.

The Safe Search function allows users searching the web to avoid malicious web sites.

Our file scanning engine scans media files, mp3s, video and play lists and checks against a blacklist of bad files. This is a result of several “proof of concepts” disclosed in public.

Having the security engines implemented in the product, we believe we can respond to security threats targeting the Windows Phone 7 platform to protect our users, whenever such threats arrive –as we have with Android — and we are committed to continuing to develop this security product to reflect the constantly changing threat landscape.

When we develop security software, your privacy is our most important policy. Our data privacy policy is what we live up to, it is public and it is serious. Our privacy policy for Windows Phone 7 is available at http://www.droidsecurity.com/privacywin.html.

All of the data we collect is used solely to offer users an exceptional security service with state-of-the-art GPS tracking.

We will not sell your data to anyone.

We do not share or otherwise disclose your data to anyone without your permission.
We do not mine your data for patterns.
We do not use your data to target ads.
We do not access your location data without your permission.

We welcome all questions regarding our products and your privacy. Please visit our website http://www.avgmobilation.com for further details.