Categories
technology

Path stealing your iPhone addressbook?

Path.com (according to reports) are sending up your entire iPhone Address book to their servers. Daring Fireball’s take on it:

Arunan Thampi, after examining the network traffic between Path’s iPhone app and their servers:

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result — my address book was in Path’s hands.

Path’s reaction, paraphrased: Hey, no big deal. We’re only using the data to help you find your friends.

Everyone else in the world’s reaction: Dude, that’s fucked up.

Humerous, yet making its point. This is a super serious issue.

Update: Path CEO responds. Perfect response. Path has deleted all the data that has been uploaded so far. A new version has been made available in the app store, which asks the user whether or not he/she wants to share his/her data.[link]

One reply on “Path stealing your iPhone addressbook?”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *