Apple Did the Right Thing and Will Enforce Explicit User Permission For Address Book Access

Finally, Apple responded to the events from the last few days. As AllThingsD's John Paczkowski just posted, the company finally broke the silence and promised it will do what has had to be done long-long time ago.

Quote:

“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. “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.”

I can only wonder why this was not done since the very beginning. One's address book is one of the most sensitive pieces of information stored on the phone. And while in most of the cases it will not kill Egyptian dissidents, carelessly handing this information to third parties is a creepy thing to do. It feels wrong.

Apple forgot (or simply overlooked) a simple and fundamental truth: developers are lazy. Being lazy is part of our job. We have a lot of problems to solve each and every single day and we tend to follow the path of least resistance. So sometimes we do stupid things. Even when an obvious better way exists. Do we have access to the address book? Check. Then we'll just upload it. We'll transmit it over https so things are pretty damn secure, right? Then just do the god damn thing and deliver it. The deadlines are coming. We're in a hurry. Ninjas are running after us. And they are on fire!

So yes, developers have done wrong. They have their part of this fail. But the biggest part lies elsewhere. And they just told they're going to fix that. Good.