Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would bold it if I were them. It's a nicely written message, but it reads like a lot of other PR apologies and it's easy to skim over it, deep in its position in the 5th paragraph. Sometimes you need to make actions speak louder than words. :)
>We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts Better would have been 'we are sorry we misused your phone contacts', rather than trying to make the users responsible by invoking their feelings. Aside: interesting how the concept of theft seems meaningless when applied to copyrighted material, but meaningful when applied to private data.
We are sorry
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Re: We are sorry
#82Re: We are sorry
#83Key paragraph: "We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path." Great save for…
I completely agree. I'm happy they actually took action and didn't just say sorry.
"We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts."
Should have been:
"We are deeply sorry that we appropriated your personal contact information and uploaded it to our servers without authorization or consent"
No real admission of wrongdoing or responsibility, only a fool would go back to trusting this company.
Re: We are sorry
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hashing phonenumber+userid does absolutely nothing for them, though. The purpose of uploading your contacts is so that if Jack's phone number is (555) 555-5555, and Sam uploads a contact list saying that he is friends with a guy whose phone number is (555) 555-5555, Path can match up those two phone numbers (or hashed versions of them) and tell Sam that Jack is a member. That match-up doesn't work if the phone number…
They could take the phone numbers, sort them and hash them together. So if Sam is 5 and Jack is 6, they both upload the hashed social relationship 56 to the system and it can match them up. It wouldn't keep someone with access from checking if a social relationship existed in the database, but it should make recovering phone numbers and the like from the hashes quite a lot harder.
Re: We are sorry
#85It'd be great to see a new "best practice" emerge from this discovery. If it's easy to use, everyone building an app will just default to comparing hashes vs. matching phone numbers.
Re: We are sorry
#86Key paragraph: "We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path." Great save for…
I would bold it if I were them. It's a nicely written message, but it reads like a lot of other PR apologies and it's easy to skim over it, deep in its position in the 5th paragraph. Sometimes you need to make actions speak louder than words. :)
Re: We are sorry
#87Only when someone caught them "in a compromising position" they said sorry.
Its like Bill Belichick saying "I misinterpreted the rule" :)
Re: We are sorry
#88I'm kind of sick of this "let's revolt against everybody using my data" mentality. They don't persist your contact data to their server. What exactly is it that you're afraid of? Moreover, how on earth did you think the "Add Friends" feature worked? I'm assuming at least some of you program software, and you should know that data doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Do you really expect a software startup to move ever…