The Indiana University has withdrawn its new sexual behavior-recording app, Kinsey Reporter, for further study over security and data protection issues.

Indiana University president Michael McRobbie made the decision to withdraw the app temporarily after general counsel Jackie Simmons voiced concerns about potential privacy issues and data protection, university spokesman Mark Land said late Wednesday afternoon to USAToday.

"The decision was made late in the day to withdraw it until our concerns can be alleviated," Land said.

The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, a nonprofit research institute at Indiana University designed the app which would allow users worldwide to report on sexual activity, birth control use, public displays of affection and other intimate behaviours anonymously. The app would then compile the data and share the results.

An experimental version of the app was available from mid-August, but the university publicly unveiled it Wednesday, only to be pulled a few hours later. The app was available for free on Apple and Android mobile platforms.

Though privacy issues were reportedly studied by IU's research and technology experts, Land said that Simmons had not seen the app and wanted to review it further to 'make sure [IU] is comfortable from a legal perspective.'

He also said it would take a while to remove the app from the Internet -its official website, Twitter feed and Facebook page.

The university's release, which was later retracted, said reports are transmitted to Kinsey Reporter using a secure, encrypted protocol and the only data collected are a timestamp, the approximate geo-location selected by the user and the tags the user chooses in response to various survey questions.

The app is a joint project of Kinsey Institute and IU's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research. Filippo Menczer, director of the center, wrote in the same release that the new platform would allow the institute to explore issues that had been complicated until now.

Among those issues are unreported sexual violence in different parts of the world and the connection between sexual practices such as condom use and its cultural, political or health contexts in certain areas.

The application is expected to be released once Indiana University's legal team will finish studying it.