Seriously

A lot, probably too much, has been written about Path in the last week. But one part of this is still really bothering me, especially among people who are telling us it isn’t as bad as we thought. Ryan Tate wrote a gotcha post where Path’s founder went on the record (but unpublished) that Path wasn’t doing what we know they are doing now. And at the time, it was technically true - they weren’t collecting and storing address book data yet.but it was imminent, and may have already been in development, when the statement was made. And even if it wasn’t, there was an obvious high profile concern about it (Ryan Tate and Dave Winer definitely count as high profile at his point) and to subsequently start collecting the data and never publicly acknowledge it is kind of terrible. And the fact that the question was raised, and answered unequivocally with “We don’t do that,” means the standard “I’m sorry” blog post rings hollow. The post below from Bijan Sabet also raises similar issues about all the other services that we give this data too, either with acknowledgement or without. If I find other services that are taking this data without my permission, I’ll have the same questions and scorn for them that I have for Path right now. I too have given a tremendous amount of data to Google. But I knew what I was getting into, and for the most part I’ve never felt lied to by Google. (Google have lots of other issues.) In many cases, apps or services ask me for this data, and I give it to them. LinkedIn is a great example; I allowed them to scan my address book and look for contacts, and they keep that list and let me know when someone from my address book joins LinkedIn. If Path had asked me, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a minute to let them scan and store that data. But they didn’t.

bijan:

The Path story continues this week.

You can check out all the various posts on the subject on Techmeme right now.

The issue is that Path 2.0 had used our personal address book data to find friends that also use Path.

At the highest level, I think that is a feature - not a bug or a problem…

Reblogged from Bijan Sabet

Tags: Path