1. I just changed my phone # 2. I notified all of my contacts to change their phone #s 3. I contacted both Apple and my State senator. 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 coul…
I think you need to crank the irony up a little further, some people aren't getting it.
I find it mind blowing that (in the comments of the blog post) someone asked the Path CEO: > Why wasn't this [sending all the contacts to your servers without users knowing] an opt-in situation to begin with? Isn't that against Apple's own T&Cs? and the Path CEO replied: > This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned,…
The CEO's comment is some grade A bullshit. Obviously they realized this was an issue before they got caught, but if they really thought that it was "important that users clearly understand it" the opt-in would have been in version 1.0, not 2.0.6.
I find it mind blowing that (in the comments of the blog post) someone asked the Path CEO: > Why wasn't this [sending all the contacts to your servers without users knowing] an opt-in situation to begin with? Isn't that against Apple's own T&Cs? and the Path CEO replied: > This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned,…
> we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we've been proactively addressing this I feel like shooting someone every time I see them (or for that matter, anyone else) doing things 'proactively' (at least three times in the comments of original blog post). My BS meter goes all red on that. What does 'proactively addressing issue of transparency' mean? Even the sentence itself is not transparent…
The funny thing is that proactively means exactly the opposite: by their own initiative, instead of waiting for someone to find out using a proxy.
Hashing phone numbers doesn't do much since the space is so small.
Key strengthening can help. If you do a bcrypt-style hash and set the cost so as to take one second on a modern CPU, brute-forcing each phone number would take about 57,000 days :) I would be more comfortable with this than giving them my entire address book, anyway.
But how long would it take to bcrypt your entire contact-list on an IPhone?
(no idea.. but might be too long..)
Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, basically any app that allows you to "search my address book for friends" will do this. All these services require either a email or phone number to sign up, so to search for friends who have also signed up for the service, you need to compare two data sets: emails or phone numbers of users you already have, and those in the person's address book. You obviously wouldn't download your en…
The addresses from the user's address book should be hashed before sending to the server and compared to hashed addresses on the server. Then only positive matches are registered, and the server doesn't see more private information than it needs.
Hashing data from address book doesn't work because people write the same addresses and even phone numbers in many different ways. Normalizing it on the client is not really an option either because it requires a lot of data to do decent normalization - not practical to send it all to each client.
I guess it's more like 1) Get the user's address book 2) upload _something_ to a server. A user could give permission to both.
Yeah, but then using apps would quickly descend into a horrible mess of deny/accept, confusing and scaring the user. The pop-up hell of windows would pale in comparison. You'd have solved the problem, but created a horrible user experience instead.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I wanted to say that it's not possible to solve the problem by asking the user's permission because API does not allow you to ask for a permission to upload specific data (address book). So there is no way to prevent an app to upload your address book without totally preventing it to upload anything.
From the traction this story is getting, it sure looks like address book information is considered sensitive by a lot of people. Possibly on par with location data.
It's sensitive depending on what you're going to do with it. If you're a native app and you want to access it so that you can show me my address book in some unique way, then I don't want to be bothered giving permission. If you're a native app that's just a front end to some social network and you're going to shuttle it off to some big database in the sky, then maybe not. The problem is that this isn't easily enforc…
> The problem is that this isn't easily enforceable at the API level without the user having to make decisions.
It's not enforceable even WITH the user having to make decisions. The user can not allow the app to upload one kind of data and disallow another (address book). You can only allow ANY upload or no upload at all.
I find it mind blowing that (in the comments of the blog post) someone asked the Path CEO: > Why wasn't this [sending all the contacts to your servers without users knowing] an opt-in situation to begin with? Isn't that against Apple's own T&Cs? and the Path CEO replied: > This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned,…
Well, maybe I'm missing something here, but I really think it's mind blowing HN-readers are only now realizing this is happening with these kind of apps.
And yeah, if you don't do this (everybody else does AFAIK) you're left with a disadvantage in hooking you up to your friends who also use the service.
I actually think the CEO's response is not that bad.
I find it mind blowing that (in the comments of the blog post) someone asked the Path CEO: > Why wasn't this [sending all the contacts to your servers without users knowing] an opt-in situation to begin with? Isn't that against Apple's own T&Cs? and the Path CEO replied: > This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned,…
I've noticed a pervasive attitude throughout the SF social app community that your app is at a disadvantage if it doesn't use all of the (potentially dirty) tricks that other apps use -- especially in a crowded space. If your app is the only one that doesn't do automatic friend discovery, or post to the Facebook news feed, your growth coefficient is going to suffer. Of course if you're the first to be found out doing these tricks, the backlash can hurt more than it helps. It's a gamble, and although the HN community is (rightly) in uproar, Joe average user likely won't care that his address book was uploaded unless he's explicitly told to be upset about it, or unless someone compromises Path's servers and he's personally hurt by it.
> What are you talking about? Do you expect them to perform complex data analysis to figure out that certain contacts are young children, and then explicitly ask permission to share those? Or do you expect them to preemptively ask for any potential sensitive contact information? "Can we use your children's information?" "Can we use your in-laws' information?" "Can we use the address of the President's safehouse?" Etc…
That still wouldn't be specific permission to share children's information specifically, which is what it seemed like your were requesting.
No, but giving him the information would have informed him sufficiently so that he could have decide whether he wanted to (a) not use the app (b) delete sensitive contacts before using).