Sarno, David. "Smartphone Apps Dial Up Privacy Worries." Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2012.
From the article: "A new furor has erupted over digital privacy concerns following disclosures that Twitter Inc. and other social networking companies are reaching into people's smartphones and retrieving their personal contact information without getting explicit permission. Twitter acknowledged this week that anyone who used its "Find Friends" feature on iPhones and Android phones was also sending every phone number and email address in his or her address book to the company, something that was not made clear to users…The mining of personal contacts lists came to light last week after an iPhone developer in Singapore discovered that an iPhone app called Path was downloading iPhone users' entire address book without alerting them…Privacy analysts say the value of user behavior data is difficult for technology companies to ignore, and in the absence of clearly drawn laws protecting users' data privacy, firms often err on the side of collecting as much information as they can." Read more
From the article: "A new furor has erupted over digital privacy concerns following disclosures that Twitter Inc. and other social networking companies are reaching into people's smartphones and retrieving their personal contact information without getting explicit permission. Twitter acknowledged this week that anyone who used its "Find Friends" feature on iPhones and Android phones was also sending every phone number and email address in his or her address book to the company, something that was not made clear to users…The mining of personal contacts lists came to light last week after an iPhone developer in Singapore discovered that an iPhone app called Path was downloading iPhone users' entire address book without alerting them…Privacy analysts say the value of user behavior data is difficult for technology companies to ignore, and in the absence of clearly drawn laws protecting users' data privacy, firms often err on the side of collecting as much information as they can." Read more
