I was very excited to hear about the ustream.tv iPhone app. I love the site and use it as my go-to application for live streaming. Yesterday, I downloaded their iPhone application.

I was wicked excited as it gave me a couple of things that I have been wanting: The ability to stream live and to do video without jail-breaking my phone. I downloaded it, logged in as BelchingMonkey and began to stream. I clicked on go live, I got one viewer and when I was finished, I selected the option to not save the video.

Luckily, I talked to Gregory Ng yesterday. I told him I downloaded the application and he said “Yeah, I saw your videos. You have 4 on the site”.

Three were videos that I did told the application not to save. The fourth was a video that I took last night, but did not even mean to take. I clicked on the app and it started recording on its own. It also HORRIFIED me when I saw this at the end of the video:

So the moral of the story here is that you can use the ustream.tv iPhone app, but be prepared for it to potentially stream your activity after you shut down the application. You could end up giving away your email addresses unwittingly or worse, allowing people a window into your personal or business email accounts.

I hope we hear a response from ustream.tv soon and plan to be very vocal about this until we hear from them. I happen to think their technology is amazing, but that they have been irresponsible in putting extremely buggy software into play. I am all for constant-beta, but these seem like problems that should be sorted out in alpha code.