Information Madness

Everyone nowadays is obsessed with tabloid journalism and reality television. At the same time, everyone is worried about individual privacy. Questions of privacy and security are nothing new for Facebook users. Actually, concern over these topics is being regularly raised by users as well as critics. The Federal Trade Commission is also looking into how Facebook handles your private data. But Facebook is a big fish. Today, there are thousands of smaller fish in the form of Apps for smartphones which are dealing with the same kind of access to your data that Facebook has and with far less scrutiny.

Last week, one of such social networking Apps, called Path, came under scrutiny after a programmer found out a major issue about it. Ironically, Path was founded by some of the people who were at Facebook in its early days.  The issue was that when you logged into the App on an Apple iOS device, an iPhone or an iPad, it automatically uploaded your entire address book to its servers without even asking you.

This was done for the reason that you could locate your friends who were also using the service. But if you are not prompted as most Apps do, it is a big intrusion. The App was sending all of your address book data in plain text to the Path’s servers. It is not clear what they were doing with it after that. This is a very big invasion of privacy. When this was brought out in the open, the App developers apologized for the practice and immediately issued an update that removed the offensive functionality.  Path was also made to delete any data it had stored.

The situation has set out a fire storm online among users, App developers and tech bloggers who have hotly debated the practice. Who knows? There may be other Apps who are doing this as well. Congress has also issued a letter to Apple with specific queries about just how Path was able to pull the data of the users without warning.

The question that has to be asked is why is it necessary for services such as Path to take our data at all?