Arun Thampi on Path uploading your whole address book to their servers:
Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path†and repeated the experiment and I got the same result – my address book was in Path’s hands.
I saw the same results over here using mitmproxy. I wonder how many other apps are doing this without anyone noticing it.
Path CEO Dave Morin was quick to reply:
Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.
We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.
I wonder how long you’ll have to wait until they get around to delete your data. I’ve been waiting to get a copy of my data for a few weeks now.