Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers

Zack S. FEB 08, 2012 | 05:19PM PST Hi Jeff,

Thanks for getting in touch with us! I have erased your contacts and their information from our servers.

On behalf of the team, I’d like to apologize for any privacy concerns that you may have had. Our current release of Path for Android requests permission to access your address book. In the next iOS release, we will have this same permission request added.

Until the update is released for iOS, selecting “Add Friends” will display the names of contacts that you have stored on your phone. But now that you’ve opted out of contact uploading, we will never re-store this data on our servers.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help you. I’m more than happy to address any further questions or concerns that you may have.

Best, Zack

I am outraged by this scandal, and I still can't bring myself to believe that Path has been collecting this sensitive personal information. My 6-month old's pediatrician's # is in my phone. If this were EVER exposed or shared with a 3rd party, I can only image what kind of damage could occur. Path should suffer for this. I forgive Apple for secretly tracking my iPhone's location for a year, but I DO NOT FORGIVE PATH. Not this time. This went to far. Dave Morin should know better. I bet an engineer voiced that he felt morally wrong doing this, and Path just fired him. This is just wrong. A defining moment in our industry. We need to stand united on this issue, and just try to move forward.

Ok, I'm going to pick on you for a second.

Hold the downvotes everyone! Let me explain.

This seems like a bit of a knee-jerk reaction akin to "think of the children!" or the whole child porn scare-mongering that politicians engage in that we on HN are always criticizing. I recognize that Path screwed up, big-time, but I'm unclear on why them having the information you cited, along with dozens or hundreds of other contacts from your address book, for millions of users, constitutes some kind of terrible threat to your children. I mean, their schools, their bus companies? How is that even remotely useful information to anyone?

I think there's plenty to criticize here from just the high-level perspective of "they used my contacts without my permission", without use the children scare-mongering tactic. But maybe there's a specific threat in mind that I'm not thinking of?

Anyway, just thought your response was a little over the top, and more informed by emotion than reason.

Ok, now everyone can downvote :)

You seriously think that this is out of the ordinary or unusual? How many huge privacy fiascos has Facebook had? And yet, they're about to IPO for $100 billion.

The only group who really cares about this is on HN. In a week, most of us will have moved on to the next big drama. In a year, no one will remember this at all.

The memory of the voting population is short, but the memory of the Internet is so infinitesimal as to almost not exist at all. And truthfully, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.