Great save for a bad mistake.
Sometimes you need to make actions speak louder than words. :)
Better would have been 'we are sorry we misused your phone contacts', rather than trying to make the users responsible by invoking their feelings.
Aside: interesting how the concept of theft seems meaningless when applied to copyrighted material, but meaningful when applied to private data.
It's not a "great save", it's a piece of PR flak arse-covering.
Still leaves me with a shitty feeling. Basically this boils down to "sorry we got caught", they knew what they were doing.
Not to single out Path, a massive number of apps are guilty of this behavior.
And so is Apple. I am alarmed that any 2 bit app can access and upload all my personal contact information for any use they want to.
Why would I not trust them with my contact info but trust that they actually have deleted it and there are no copies.
Also, these are developers, there are copies, it's a near certainty.
Since we're talking about a fantastic breach of trust, I'd like clarification that all copies of all uploaded contact information have been deleted from all servers (even ones that one could argue are other people's), and from all backup media, and further that no effort will ever be made to try to recover this information.
Because, I'm sorry, but anybody who thinks its OK to violate someone's privacy like this is at best someone who is able to easily justify unethical behavior because they think their business might depend on it and at worst a sociopath.
There is not a human on earth who would not object if someone else picked up their phone and started looking through the contacts.
TO FEEL, as in "we still don't give a shit whether you actually _ARE_ completely in control of your information"
I'm not so sure.
The updated iPhone app does the right thing.
What do the apps not updated to the latest version do? Does it re-upload the contacts? If it does, what does the server do with the data?
I assume that you are not ware of the FTC fine involved if they kept the data, right?
Its almost as bad was Zynga pulled its first year in operations