Hey, iPhone owners! Worried that another app (like Instagram) is going to pull a Path and upload your entire address book to its servers without your explicit permission?
Non-jailbroken iPhone owners have little recourse but to put faith in their apps, trusting that the uproar over Path's decision to store the contents of users' address books on its servers has scared other app developers away from the practice.
Don't add Instagram to that list, however. Instagram also uses a plain-text copy of an iPhone owner's contact list to power the service's friend-matching system. And while Instagram was able to sneak under the radar while much of the Web was busy criticizing the heck out of Path over the last few days, the company hasn't made any major changes to the app's functionality in the post-Path fiasco era: Instagram will still upload a user's content list if a user wants to find friends on the service.
The difference? According to TheNextWeb's Matt Brian, Instagram just recently updated its iOS app to require users to give the app permission to upload their contact lists. It's a simple tweak, but one that's designed to allow users to opt-out of a practice they might not otherwise fully understand.
Privacy critics might still object to the technicalities of Instagram's upload process – a full, plain-text upload of one's contacts. In a perfect world, the app would hash a user's data and forge connections off of that information, a method that obscures the actual details of a user's contact data in case the information is somehow acquired by a nefarious third party.
"This is a good alternative solution which we'll look into. Thanks for the idea," wrote Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin after Arun Thampi – original discoverer of Path's contact list uploading process – brought up hashing in a blog comment.
While running a jailbroken iPhone doesn't solve the issue of how an app actually transmits a user's contact info, it does allow iPhone owners to at least have a little more control over when apps copy and send the info. The Cydia app ContactPrivacy, which can be acquired by adding the repository "rpetri.ch/repo" to one's Cydia app store, automatically generates a permission box whenever an app attempts to access and send a user's contact info. No user approval; no upload.
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