Honestly, I don't understand the fuss. I thought everyone had figured out and come to terms with the fact years ago that social media is all about gathering as much data as possible. The degree of precision with which Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. recommend "people I might know" makes it pretty obvious that they know a lot about me, regardless of where they got the information from. And I don't blame them in the least - these are all free consumer apps that can only exist by having a lot of users, so if they can get a few more by utilizing data that is right in front of them they'd be crazy not to use it. If anything, people should be angry at Apple. Considering how notoriously annoying their approval process is for the sole purpose of protecting their users, they probably should have made app permissions more explicit or let users opt out of individual permissions like facebook recently started allowing.
Additionally, nobody has touched on the fact that companies can use address books to prevent fraudulent use. For most of the companies listed there isn't too much to be gained from fraudulent use. But you can imagine for services that frequently have to address fraud and, say, don't want a single user to have multiple accounts or that want to make sure all their accounts are owned by real people, doing things like cross-validating address books can be very useful. This can still be done if you hash the names and phone numbers before uploading them, though, which is maybe what everyone should be doing.
tl;dr Data is money/power these days, it's strange that people are shocked by companies making use of all the data they have access to.
What this whole line of stories has forced me to think more about than I had in the past is the question: "Why do these companies even exist? Why'd they even create the app they created?". Take Path ... what's its purpose? Are they developing it because they want to give people a better way of sharing photos with their friends? What's in it for them? Why would they even care? Furthermore, why does that information even matter? Ultimately, the only answer I keep coming back to is that the only reason these companies exist is to collect information, and re-purpose that information in the form of intelligent advertising, or other revenue-generation relationships they have with partner companies that find value in knowing as much about someone as possible in order to generate some portion of their overall revenue by using that information to their advantage. Same goes for FB, or any other social service.
I guess I'm just deflated in that while some aspects of these services enrich my life in some way by exposing me to information I might not otherwise have easy access to ... their primary reason for existence seems misguided from the start. A service built just to advance the quest towards personal or shared wealth feels unnecessarily shallow to me when the ingredients used to generate that wealth are of such a personal nature.
If you come home from work some day, to find Facebook employees going through your dumpster, are you going to be ok with that?
Probably not, right? You know they want to gather as much data as possible, but you are angry, because you never gave them permission to go through your thrash.
I think thats how some people feel if an application goes through their phonebook, when they didn't give it permission to; the phonebook is not information people consider public; its privileged. Thats where there's a fuss.
That's a reasonable analogy, but I still think the anger should be directed at apple. The way I see it, it's like I told my friend to watch my sandwich for a minute and I come back and someone else is eating it because my friend had handed it to him. I'm going to be mad at my friend; the other guy took advantage of an opportunity to get a free sandwich, which I can hardly blame him for.
Analogy isn't needed at all. Address book uploaded without permission... enough said. To your second point, I agree, Apple should have a setting on the iPhone that denies ANYONE but the owner of the iPhone access to the address book. In addition, each app should be forced to ask for permission to use contacts. The ball is in Apple's court to explain.
THe thing we're shocked about is that apps could access our address book and upload them wholesale to their servers without our knowledge or permission. That's a huge privacy violation.
Facebook knows about the connections I've told it about, or others have requested and I've approved.
Yes, it may be useful - but the address book on my phone is quite personal, and not something I would hand over to a 3rd party readily. There are people in there, let's say, who I wouldn't WANT people to know are in there. There may be people in there who hate other people in there.
So.. they can take my address book and do what they want with it? No amount of "cool stuff" adds up to allowing a 3rd party company to have the contents of my personal contact list, sorry. This is really bad.
Additionally, nobody has touched on the fact that companies can use address books to prevent fraudulent use. For most of the companies listed there isn't too much to be gained from fraudulent use. But you can imagine for services that frequently have to address fraud and, say, don't want a single user to have multiple accounts or that want to make sure all their accounts are owned by real people, doing things like cross-validating address books can be very useful. This can still be done if you hash the names and phone numbers before uploading them, though, which is maybe what everyone should be doing.
tl;dr Data is money/power these days, it's strange that people are shocked by companies making use of all the data they have access to.