Social networking service Path has bowed to pressure from the controversy that has become known as “Address Book-Gate” or “Path-Gate”, and has publicly apologised for uploading iOS users' entire address books to its databases.
The major cause for concern, initially highlighted by Arun Thampi, of Singapore, earlier this week, was the fact that Path's uploading of users' address books was done without requesting permission and without being mentioned in the service's terms of use.
Path CEO Dave Morin has now publicly stated “we made a mistake”, and acknowledged that the “Add Friends” feature was not designed correctly.
“As our mission is to build the world's first personal network, a trusted place for you to journal and share life with close friends and family, we take the storage and transmission of your personal information very, very seriously,” says Morin. “We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.”
Morin says the use of the address book information was limited to improving the quality of friend suggestions and no more. “We always transmit this and any other information you share on Path to our servers over an encrypted connection,” says Morin.
Path has, as a result of the controversy, deleted its entire collection of user uploaded contact information. An updated version of the application (Path 2.0.6) also now offers users the choice of uploading their contacts or not, which is available in the App Store.
Not alone
Path is, however, not the only social service to have been caught out. Another service, Hipster, has also admitted that it “dropped the ball” on user privacy, after a user found it was also automatically sending users' address book information to its servers.
The privacy faux pas was detailed by user Mark Chang, and has led to a public apology by Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow.
Ludlow says in a guest post on TechCrunch: “Mark's criticisms were spot on and, needless to say, we're pretty embarrassed by the situation. Embarrassed not because we had malicious goals in mind (we don't store the contact data we pull - we just match it to existing users), but embarrassed by the fact that we pushed a feature that doesn't meet our standards for the protection of our users' data.”
Hipster has also released an updated version of its iOS app, which makes the “Find Friends” feature opt-in.
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