Mobile apps. record user's data without permission.

Companies that make many of the most popular smartphone apps for Apple and Android devices — Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram among them — routinely gather the information in personal address books on the phone and in some cases store it on their own computers. The practice came under scrutiny Wednesday by members of Congress who saw news reports that taking such data was an “industry best practice.”

While Apple says it prohibits and rejects any app that collects or transmits users’ personal data without their permission, that has not stopped some of the most popular applications for the iPhone, iPad and iPod — like Yelp, Gowalla, Hipster and Foodspotting — from taking users’ contacts and transmitting it without their knowledge.

Google, which makes the Android operating system software, forces developers to ask users for permission to access any personal data up front.

The app makers collect the data to help quickly expand the network of people using their program. The practice of taking address book information without permission first came to light last week, when a developer noticed that Path, a mobile social network, was uploading entire address books to its servers without users’ knowledge. The company has since said it will stop the practice and destroy the data it has collected.

But Path is hardly the only mobile application that collects address books. Last February, Lookout, a mobile security company, found that 11 percent of free applications in Apple’s iTunes Store had the ability to access users’ contacts. And on Tuesday, VentureBeat, a technology blog, reported that dozens of applications for Apple devices were taking users’ address books without permission.
Lookout website: https://www.mylookout.com/
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/google-and-mobile-apps-take-data-books-without-permission/


Disruptions: so many apologies, so much data mining.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/disruptions-so-many-apologies-so-much-data-mining/