The National Security Agency and its British counterpart have reportedly targeted Angry Birds and other unsecured mobile phone apps to vacuum up data.

According to top-secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, first published by The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica, the NSA and the U.K.'s GCHQ have been developing methods to slurp users' private data from smartphone apps that transmit that information across the internet, unprotected. One of the apps targeted was Angry Birds.

The data the spy agencies are interested in includes information like phone models, as well as more personal information like age, gender and, importantly, location. The information can be soaked up en mass using their existing mass surveillance capabilities, rather than hacking individual mobile devices.

The documents show that collecting data from smartphone apps is increasingly important to the spy agencies. One NSA document talked of a "golden nugget," an ideal case where the NSA could get large amounts of information about a target from smartphone app data, including the networks the target was connected to, the location of the target, websites visited, contact information, and documents downloaded by the target. Specific sexual preferences of a target can even be obtained by collecting some smartphone app data.

Apps like Angry Birds, Flickr, Flixster, Facebook-connected apps, and others could give the agencies user information, in analysis processes described by the documents. "Anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system," said one 2008 document from the GCHQ.

Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds, said it had no knowledge of NSA or GCHQ programs looking to take data from its app, telling The Guardian: "Rovio doesn't have any previous knowledge of this matter, and have not been aware of such activity in 3rd party advertising networks" Saara Bergström, Rovio's vice president of marketing and communications continued, "Nor do we have any involvement with the organizations... mentioned." It's not likely that any smartphone app makers were consulted or involved in the data collection.

An NSA spokesperson said in a statement to The Guardian that the agency is only interested in "valid foreign intelligence targets," stating "any implication that NSA's foreign intelligence collection is focused on the smartphone or social media communications of everyday Americans is not true."

"Any implication that NSA's foreign intelligence collection is focused on the smartphone or social media communications of everyday Americans is not true. Moreover, NSA does not profile everyday Americans as it carries out its foreign intelligence mission. We collect only those communications that we are authorized by law to collect for valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes -- regardless of the technical means used by the targets. Because some data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA's lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of data. In addition, NSA actively works to remove extraneous data, to include that of innocent foreign citizens, as early as possible in the process."

In a much-publicized speech earlier in January, President Obama announced reforms to the NSA's mass surveillance programs. However, Obama mainly focused on the metadata collection programs (collecting U.S. citizens' phone records), and did not mention several other programs exposed by the Snowden leaks. And, of course, Obama did not offer reforms to the smartphone app data collection program, which was not known until a week later.