As talked about on your friendly neighborhood Tech Report today, word came out late yesterday that Path, an emerging social network, was doing some pretty messed up things on your iPhone. Path is a mobile-only social network where you share photos and comments and messages and whatever with your friends. But there is such a thing as oversharing and the Path app was gobbling up the information from your address book and sending it to Path’s servers. Not only that, it was doing so unencrypted so anyone could intercept it. What do you mean, it doesn’t really matter if someone knows your mom’s phone number? IT’S THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT.
Path says it’s all in the interest of helping you share more and be more social (“all the better to see you with,” said the Big Bad Wolf). The Android version of the app has the sharing feature set to opt-in now and Path is scrambling to do that with iPhone as well.
What’s really creepy about this is that any app could be doing this. So you find a new game or a movie review site and it could grab your address book. To be safe: SEVER ALL YOUR RELATIONSHIPS.
I’m kind of in love with ALL CAPS TODAY.
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