Mobile Apps Take Data Without Permission

Excerpt from an article in The New York Times
Thursday, February 16, 2012

Mobile Apps Take Data Without Permission 

By NICOLE PERLROTH and NICK BILTON

SAN FRANCISCO - The address book in smartphones - where some of the user's most personal data is carried - is free for app developers to take at will, often without the phone owner's knowledge.

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."

Apple, which approves all apps that appear in its iTunes store, addressed the controversy on Wednesday after lawmakers sent the company a letter asking how approved apps were allowed to take address book data without users' permission. Apple's published rules on apps expressly prohibit that practice.

But in its statement about the issue, Apple did not address why those apps that collect address book data had been approved.

In that statement, Tom Neumayr, an Apple spokesman, said: "Apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines. We're working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release."

The Federal Trade Commission regulates the use of consumers' data on the Internet, and in the past it has sanctioned big companies like Facebook and Google over privacy issues. It said Wednesday that it would make no comment about the app makers' practices.