Social networking app Path hit the headlines yesterday after it turned out the company was taking users’ entire address books and uploading them to their servers.
It’s a big privacy violation, but Path’s hardly the only one doing this. In fact, computer engineering professor Mark Chang has just discovered that Hipster, the popular photo-filter postcards app, does the exact same thing as Path: sucks up your contacts and squirts them into their servers.
We told you yesterday that Path was secretly uploading your iPhone’s entire address book to its servers. Users of the inclusive social network voiced concern, and many decided to remove the app entirely until Path addresses the issue in an upcoming update.
It’s common practice for third-party apps to access and even store your contacts elsewhere. The problem with Path is that there was no indication that this activity was taking place. Path’s CEO stated that the app would make the activity opt-in when the next update is pushed out.
Thanks to a brand new jailbreak tweak, you’ll never have to worry about an app silently stealing your personal contacts data again.
In what can only be considered the very definition of irony, it has been discovered that Path 2 for iPhone secretly uploads and stores your entire address book to its servers. In case you didn’t know, Path is a hot iOS app that offers an exclusive, confined social network experience with a limited number of people. Unlike Facebook, Path only lets you accept 150 friends, indicating the intimate, safe environment that the app creators want users to feel at home in.
Developer Arun Thampi has uncovered that Path’s current iPhone app sends all of your contacts to its servers without notifying you. Oops.
We’ve already shown you how to sync your address book with the Facebook app for iOS to add profile pictures and other credentials, but what if you prefer to use Twitter instead? Well, fortunately for you, you can also sync your address book with Twitter, and it’s incredibly easy thanks to iOS 5’s Twitter integration.
There’s been a lot of ohhing and ahhing about Cobook in the last few days, but spend just a few minutes playing with it and you’re likely to be ohhing and ahhing too. I know I am.
Developers have already received several pre-release builds of Apple’s OS X Lion 10.7.3 software, and we had expected last week’s release to be the last one before the update goes public. But it seems there’s still some testing to be done. Apple has seeded yet another build to developers through the Mac Dec Center, this time with the build number 11D50.
Adding contact information to your phone can be a tedious task, especially with devices like the iPhone, which allow you to add a whole lot more than just a name and a phone number. But there is one quick and easy way to add missing information to your address book without even touching your device’s virtual keyboard: Syncing your contacts with Facebook.
If you’re a Facebook user — and who isn’t these days? — and you have the official Facebook app installed on your device, you can add birthdays, URLs, and even photos to your address book in just a few taps.
I ran into someone the other day and he told me that he had over 700 contacts in the Address Book app on his Mac. He expressed concern about losing those contacts. I asked him, “are you performing backups on your Mac?” He wasn’t. We talked about the various ways he could backup his Mac (i.e. Time Machine, external drive, etc.), but I also shared a tip with him that focuses on his contacts.
Apple issued its first iOS 5 update to the public yesterday — an update which was released to fix “bugs affecting battery life” under the latest firmware, amongst other issues. Following the update, however, users have reported that their battery life has seen no improvement, and that iOS 5.0.1 comes with more bugs of its own.
In OS X Lion, Apple redesigned Address Book with a new look that resembles a physical hardcover book binding. This type of design choice is called “skeuomorphic,” because it was, “deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar.” Lion’s version of Address Book takes the old look and feel of a physical book and ports that to a virtual application.
While some may like the new look of Address Book in Lion, many have raised complaints. If you’d like to make Address Book look clean and simple again, we’ve got just the trick to unbind Address Book from its brown hardcover.
![How To Keep Apps Like Path From Accessing Your Contacts Data [Jailbreak]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Screen-shot-2012-02-08-at-12.47.49-PM.jpg "Screen shot 2012-02-08 at 12.47.49 PM")
![Sync Your Contacts With Twitter To Add Usernames & Photos To Your Address Book [iOS Tip]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Screen-Shot-2012-01-31-at-17.27.53-1.jpg "Twitter-contacts-sync")
![Quickly Add Missing Contact Info To Your Address Book By Syncing Contacts With Facebook [iOS Tip]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/IMG_0693-11.jpg "IMG_0693-1")
![Easily Backup Your Address Book Contacts To External Media And Maintain A Historical Archive [OS X Tips]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/addressbook.jpg "addressbook")
