The controversy surrounding “Path-gate”, and the social app's uploading of users' address book information to its servers, has opened a proverbial can of worms in the social application space.
Path was hammered by the Twitter-verse and media last week, after it emerged the app was uploading users' contact lists to its servers, without asking for permission or mentioning it in its terms of service.
Path was, however, not alone, as other services such as Hipster also came forward with a public apology. Path also issued an update to its app, which included a new feature that asked for user permission before using address book data - this was, however, only after Path CEO Dave Morin had initially defended the practice, stating it was an industry standard.
Popular photo-sharing app Instagram also appears to have been guilty of the same privacy oversight. The service has quietly issued an update to its application that also now asks for permission before uploading address book information to its servers.
New media lawyer Paul Jacobson says control over user data in the social space is essentially an illusion, using Facebook as an example: “Even if you can notionally delete your information, and it may be removed from public view, it's still there and you can't know for sure what happens to it.”
Jacobson says the method services, like Path was using to upload users' entire address books to its servers, is a step back for industry standards.
Informed consent
“The norm is more for one to grant access to third-party services that have limited access to one's contacts - access which you can revoke at any time. The problem with Path's method was that you couldn't revoke such access.
“A social service's privacy policy should at the very least inform users of the data they access and ask for consent,” says Jacobson. “It comes down to what the consumer can legitimately expect in terms of privacy.
“In SA there is the requirement that users must be able to find out what information is being collected from them, what it is being used for and how securely it is being stored. So it should be a case of getting users' informed consent.”
As data continues to shift to the cloud, the steps that services take to protect it will become increasingly important. Jacobson says the Path-gate controversy is to the benefit of users, as it has placed pressure on social apps to be more transparent in the way they collect and store user data.
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