Apple will require apps to ask users for permission to address books

http://allthingsd.com/20120215/apple-app-access-to-contact-data-will-require-explicit-user-permission/

by bproper • 14 years ago

210 106 14 years ago

dan1234• 14 years ago

Well, better late than never. I still don't get why this wasn't in from the very beginning, considering the protection covering the location and camera roll.

brudgers• 14 years ago

The cynical side of me thinks it was to foster the development of free and low cost apps in lieu of encouraging development of a mobile web accessible to devices from many manufacturers...the business side of me does as well.

gurkendoktor3• 14 years ago

Apple has previously erred on the side of the web too when their Safari form autocomplete leaked address data. I don't think we need a conspiracy theory for everything.

jackalope• 14 years ago

Would it make sense to store addresses in the Keychain?

siculars• 14 years ago

You had to see this coming. Nice to see Congress stepping in and up for the consumer. Can't wait for Apple's detailed reply.

bradleyland• 14 years ago

Really, because frankly, I don't want Congress mucking about in this matter. There's been tremendous consumer backlash over this issue. Application developers and Apple are forming a response that looks pretty positive. The Congressional involvement, from my perspective, is just a meaningless dog & pony show. It won't have any bearing on the outcome.

I really dislike the line of reasoning that the government should step in any time a company makes a mistake. If something egregious is happening, then let's get the government involved, but what we don't need, is Washington getting their panties in a wad and trying to craft some new legislation. We all know how that turns out.

Aaronontheweb• 14 years ago

Law should always be the option of last resort for fixing a problem, never the go-to under most circumstances.

Laws do not go away in the United States - they can get overridden or re-interpreted by judges, but they never leave the books once they're on them. Part of the reason why our legal system has so many pitfalls is that laws written in bygone eras intended for use-cases that no longer exist can be interpreted and applied to modern scenarios.

Consumers should vote with their feet and wallets by using different apps that don't misuse their contact information or perhaps a different mobile platform altogether.

vl• 14 years ago

I think in this case Congress involvement was a bit uncharacteristic and populistic. We see so many issue in this area, and they are stepping in for a relatively minor issue on a platform which is generally most resrictive and protective?

I would rather see them stepping in and kicking AT&T (and friends) for 20c cost per SMS, non-free incoming SMS and abolishment of bulk SMS plans. Just recently I wanted to sign up for 100 for $5 plan, it's not there anymore, the only bulk plan left if $20 unlimited. This is ridiculous oligopoly and consumer exploitation.

SimHacker• 14 years ago

Congress will soon pass a law that makes it illegal for consumers to get brain damage from cell phones.

brador2• 14 years ago

Can users who were affected by this still sue them for anything?

monochromatic2• 14 years ago

Sue Apple?

brador2• 14 years ago

Apple or the companies that used this "feature"...

Maybe under EU privacy laws?

ary• 14 years ago

A few years ago developers were bemoaning all the arduous controls as hurdles. Today people cry out for them. I, for one, am thankful that people are at least expecting a higher standard.

rmc2• 14 years ago

And a few years ago people were telling us that we needed Apple's strict guidelines to prevent rouge apps for doing this sort of evil behaviour. Apple's rules are ineffective.

ambler02• 14 years ago

Doesn't the fact that companies like Path are exploiting people's address book information illustrate that we do need such strict guidelines?

So Apple didn't make enough rules. That doesn't mean that the existing rules were ineffective. I just don't understand your criticism here.

CamperBob• 14 years ago

No one was complaining about having to ask the user for permission to access an address book. People were complaining about silly, arbitrary rules, like banning dictionary apps for "not being family friendly" or walling off entire areas of computer science from third-party developers because of some obscure pissing match between Steve and Adobe.

It's disingenuous at best to compare user privacy protection with the massive list of rules enforced by Apple for reasons that never had anything to do with protecting users.

billpatrianakos2• 14 years ago

I'm torn on this issue. A part of me fears for developers. The practice of uploading address books is not a new phenomenon but suddenly over the past week everyone has jumped on it as if it's some brand new conspiracy to invade our privacy. It didn't hurt anyone before this became a hot news story and I'm confident that more than a handful of people knew about it before then too. But there's a very valid concern about it nonetheless so putting aside the issue of whether it's alright to upload the user's address book at all in any way this issue still makes me fear for developers.

I'm afraid because it seems like these days everyone wants their apps for free with absolutely no strings attached. There's an entitlement on the web that you don't see anywhere else. On the web we expect to get the best, coolest, most entertaining, problem-solving, pain-point-eliminating products and services free and we expect the providers of those products and services to bend to our will in the way they operate too. So let's give the critics this one and say that yeah, it's absolutely necessary to ask permission first before accessing the iOS address book. Okay but what's next? We're used to going nuts about slippery slopes when it comes to the user but what about some companies? They're not all evil like some would make them out to be. Are we going to demand that Google stop showing ads because they're confusing or annoying when mixed with organic results? Will we demand the ability to post to Facebook and Twitter.. anonymously? Will we band together and force companies to add features that muddy already good products because a noisy few were, well, really noisy?

That's what I fear. I fear that the balance of power between users and developers will swing too far I'm the user direction. Make no mistake, I'm not saying a service provider should be able to do whatever it pleases with no say from users. I do believe, however, that there needs to be a balance of power (or influence, whatever you want to call it) and that balance should never swing too far in either direction. Its not often that I hear "I don't like that company/developer/service provider X is doing Y so I quit using them". Instead I often hear "they're doing X and I hate it do come complain with me and let's make them change that". That's fine a lot of times but I'm afraid that at some point people's sense of entitlement will grow too large and there will be outrage where none is needed and where the best course of action for a small minority would be to quit using X while the majority who are alright with it continue. In some cases like Google and Facebook the service has become so ingrained in our lives that it's hard to just quit using it and in those cases I'm willing to forgive a lot of seemingly frivolous outrage but in other cases it wouldnt be that awful to find an alternative.

I just wonder if one day the frivolous outrage of a noisy minority will ruin a product or service for the very content majority.

dantheman• 14 years ago

No one has a problem sharing their address book as long as they know that it's being done and they approve. The rest of your comment doesn't really seem to fit, if people don't like what a company/app is doing they complain and eventually stop using it. You, as a developer, can choose to try and keep them by meeting their needs or not. The problem is that apps have been doing things that the customer didn't know or approve of - the fault is clearly on the developer in that case. In general, be honest and let your customer know why you need what you need, e.g. to provide a better service, to serve better ads, to resell to 3rd parties etc.

monochromatic2• 14 years ago

1. This is far from frivolous.

2. The "very content majority" are just people who, reasonably enough, never even thought about the possibility that apps were doing underhanded things like this.

Turing_Machine• 14 years ago

Exactly.

Think of it this way:

A salesman is visiting a customer's home or office. The customer goes to the bathroom. When the customer comes back, he finds the salesman has picked up the customer's phone, called another salesman back at headquarters, and is going through the contact list and reading all the info out to the other salesman.

Will the customer be happy? No, he will not.

Will he be satisfied if the salesman then issues a non-apology apology ("we're sorry if you were offended"), claims that he was only doing it to "help the customer connect better", or tries to blame it on the customer and/or the phone manufacturer because the information wasn't locked? No, he will not.

In general, right and wrong don't change just because the action is carried out by software rather than direct human intervention.

freehunter2• 14 years ago

>I'm afraid because it seems like these days everyone wants their apps for free with absolutely no strings attached. There's an entitlement on the web that you don't see anywhere else.

I want a car for free, too, with no taxes and no insurance. Who cares what people want? Give them what you give them and they will decide the price they're willing to pay. No one is surprised when Facebook has all your contact information because you decided to give it to them. And if you want to give them access to your personal address book, you make that choice. They don't do it automatically behind your back.

The problem isn't that they're doing it, that's perfectly fine. The problem is they don't tell you. The very content majority will be just as content knowing it's going on. Asking for forgiveness instead of permission is much harder when the risk is your customer's trust in you.

billpatrianakos2• 14 years ago

That makes sense in theory but from what I've seen it doesn't always work that way. Most people don't stop using something and complain really loudly. Luckily, so far the people behind the sites or apps or whatever hold their ground and in this case I can certainly get on board with the popular opinion that apps should ask for permission first. I wasn't condoning that kind of thing but simply wondering what if it really was something frivolous like G+ not allowing naked profile pictures or something and they ended up giving into the pressure? We talk a lot about slippery slopes around here and I just applied that kind of thinking to this sort of thing.

I also wonder how much of this outrage is genuine and how much is just people thinking they should be outraged. Personally, I'd have no problem with apps getting the contents of my address book. Of course thats conditional but what I'm getting at is that this sort of thing isn't okay or not okay by itself, it's how it's framed that often makes it looked at this way. In this case it was framed as a terrible invasion of privacy with lots of room for security issues. What if it was framed as being awesome because it totally enhances the experience of the app? Maybe around here we're qualified to say "this is okay, that isn't" because of our knowledge and backgrounds but think of regular folks playing Angry Birds on their phones having no clue what a iOS is. I'm not sure they really have an opinion until you give them one and thats exactly what we're doing. So when you say they'd be just as content knowing its going on you're correct but I'm not so sure they'd come to the conclusion that it was bad while they didn't know totally on their own. I can totally picture a lot of regular folks finding out and saying "oh, they upload the address book? I didn't notice. Whatever." and continue on with their day. Of course that won't happen now because of how this is reported.

Anyway, I'm sorry to see so many people having such strong negative reactions to my original comment. Maybe I didn't make the point clear enough or maybe my thinking really is just way off on this one. Either way, I still maintain that these what-if questions will really get you thinking differently about this stuff.

tferris• 14 years ago

Android has this feature for years or call it a very granular and understandable permission system for apps.

(Don't want to start a flame war and I am not really an Android fan)

functionform• 14 years ago

This is a clear marketing opportunity for the Android platform, of course since no one really governs its course, it's completely being missed. I suppose cheaper/more features/hotter phones is the way they want to go.

nigelsampson2• 14 years ago

I'm also surprised Microsoft hasn't taken advantage of this in marketing Windows Phone since it has a capabilities model similar to Android.

lawnchair_larry• 14 years ago

Android's permissions model doesn't work at all. Every app asks for a ton of permissions at install time. You can't install the app without saying yes, and every app asks for far more than it needs.

In theory, it is good, but in practice, it's broken.

The iOS way installs the app, but denies access to the resource.

bentlegen• 14 years ago

Funny – if I see an Android app requesting a permission that I'm not comfortable with, I just don't install it.

How do you expect this to work otherwise?

baconner4• 14 years ago

That's a bit hyperbolic. My android apps don't ask for permissions they don't need nor do many others.

I think the android permission system is sane and reasonably functional. It's the users responsibility to read the requested permissions at install time and make a call.

There could be improvements here of course. I'd like to see a two tiered approach where developers could mark which permissions are optional and users could decide which to grant the on the first or each time these permissions are used in addition to the current method. I'd also like to see a requirement for devs to provide an explination of what each requested permission is needed for that could display on the market.

Hopefully these types of controls will continue to evolve on all platforms.

baconner4• 14 years ago

Side question about ios I wonder about. If you buy an app and install it, but then find it needs to use some permission you're not comfortable with can you get your money back or are you just out of.luck?

falling3• 14 years ago

That’s not perfect either.

It’s granular from the developer point of view, but it’s not for the user: when you install an app you either grant it all the permissions it requires (before you have a chance to actually run the app and see what it does) or you don’t install it at all.

With the iOS model (asking permissions when the app uses them) I can install an app, deny it permission to use my location and it will still work for everything else.

Also, how would that solve the problem if the Android developers forgot to add the ”read contacts” permission in the SDK? They would still have to update the software to add it.

SomeCallMeTim3• 14 years ago

If they forgot to add "read contacts" in their application manifest, then the code that tried to read the contacts would ALWAYS fail. Even on the simulator, which is rooted.

It would be nice to allow or deny an app "optional" permissions (selected as optional BY the app) at run-time. It would NOT be nice for users to be able to do this willy-nilly. With the dozens of possible permissions, you'd have millions of potential combinations a particular user could enable or disable, and you'd need to be sure your app worked with any combination.

But worse than that is the fact that a lot of apps are monetized by ads, and disabling "INTERNET" permission would prevent ads from downloading. If I'm trying to make a living off of my app, I don't want to make it easy for people to get it for free. Some people will anyway, of course, but no need to make it easy.

RKearney• 14 years ago

BlackBerry OS also had a granular approach to permissions, much like Android.

iOS seems to only care about your location when it comes to permissions which worries me a little.

funkah• 14 years ago

So, developers will do their contact stealing with Mac or Windows apps instead. Better than nothing.

watty• 14 years ago

There are much more valuable files to steal off a computer than a phone. The reason you won't see it (often) is because it's so much easier to watch traffic on your computer. Any company doing this would be taking a huge risk and would likely be caught within a day.

jinushaun• 14 years ago

I'm an iOS developer and I can't believe it has taken Apple so long to implement a security popup when accessing the address book, or that adding address book support doesn't require the developer to declare in the info.plist that this app needs access to it.

smackfu• 14 years ago

This kind of thing really requires good faith efforts from both Apple and the developers. A system-generated prompt for your address book is not particularly useful if it comes up on first launch of the app with no explanation why the app wants the data, like a lot of apps do with location services today.

nimblegorilla• 14 years ago

If an app asks for location information I usually deny it. I would do the same thing for my address book and photos if I had the ability.

Almost all of the apps I use have no reason to need my addressbook data so it would be nice to know that none of those are secretly stealing it.

Francisc• 14 years ago

Oh they caught on to this minor security issue. Well done Apple.

ugh• 14 years ago

That’s really annoying. If so many developers weren’t so stupid and evil, strict guidelines from Apple and social pressure could easily solve this. Isn’t that how it’s solved on the desktop (minus the guidelines)?

Yes, I can see that an App Store makes it easier for people to install all kinds of apps. (I can also see that more people are going to have more extensive address books on their mobile phones compared to their PCs.) There isn’t really a handful of developers anymore (like there were on the Mac for the longest time) who you know you can trust.

And yes, spyware was also a problem on the desktop – but usually not one for high profile apps. If the developer was big and had something to lose you could be somewhat certain that they were not going to sell you out.

But no. More dialogs everyone will ignore anyway. Not a real solution by any stretch of the imagination.

feralchimp2• 14 years ago

Welcome news, and hopefully the existing entitlements system will allow this change to be made quickly and clearly.

More granularity might be nice also. They could have a separate "names only" entitlement, or allow users to identify address book contacts / fields that should never be shared; that are redacted in content returned by the underlying APIs.

Important to note that this still does not address the wholesale detailed export and persistence of contact data by developers. Could be opp for a new provider there.

sshumaker• 14 years ago

Granularity comes with a cost: complexity. Complexity which would be foisted on the end-users. It's a slippery slope - you can quickly end up with android-style permissions, where the user has to understand (and usually doesn't) dozens of options.

I doubt Apple will go this route.

feralchimp2• 14 years ago

Spot on.

moe3• 14 years ago

Android's permission system would be great if it wasn't for the one fatal flaw: Some idiot decided to make it declarative instead of deductive.

This is one of these fundamental bugs where you can only wonder what they are smoking at google.

Instead of automatically scanning the code for actual API calls ("Ah, trying to send SMS here") they require the developer to manually declare their desired permissions in a separate manifest-file.

Unsurprisingly this has led to the current situation where every little "wallpaper clock" app demands every permission under the sun, and then some, without ever actually using them. Developers are just dumb and lazy like that, go figure...

So, my point is, android-style permission granularity is not a problem at all. Just make sure "can read phonebook" translates to will actually read your phonebook (hopefully soon in iOS) instead of developer is probably incompetent (Android).

homosaur• 14 years ago

I know this is against Apple's M.O., but why does everything have to be dumbed down to fit the needs of the most basic of consumers? Most people are not stupid and you could certainly make the permissions system far more clear and simple with some engineering forethought.

Maybe you SHOULD know something about smartphones before you use them. It would certainly make users safer.

st3fan2• 14 years ago

"After a week of silence, Apple has finally responded to reports..."

"Better late than never..."

Why do people expect that Apple respond realtime to these kinds of things?

These are complex issues and tough decisions that need lots of thought and discussion within the iOS teams at Apple. These things take time.

Remember, iOS is deployed to how many devices now? 100 million? Do you think they can come to conclusions in between two tweets?

Honestly, having an answer ready in a week is not bad at all I think.

mikeash2• 14 years ago

"Better late than never" is saying that this protection should have been in the OS from the very beginning, years ago, rather than being tacked on now. It's not related to taking a week to respond to the latest fluff.

pja• 14 years ago

Why do people expect that Apple respond realtime to these kinds of things?

I think people believe that Apple should have considered the privacy implications of allowing Apps unfettered access to user contact data years ago, rather than only reacting when it becomes a PR issue that user-data is being misappropriated by shady App developers who appear to believe that making money is more important than the privacy of their users.

(My personal guess is that they did think about it, after all they introduced Location access permissions with iOS 2.0, but decided that an Android-style permissions matrix would put off end-users. In other words, I suspect that Apple made exactly the same decision that their App developers did: ease-of-use was more important than user privacy.)

Tyrannosaurs• 14 years ago

I think you're absolutely right, but I the point kind of still stands - when evidence appears that challenges your agreed position, you should still consider it properly before responding rather than make a knee jerk reaction.

reddit_clone3• 14 years ago

Also, asking for forgiveness is far easier than asking for permission.

st3fan2• 14 years ago

Yeah they must have thought about it a little. I think the main reason there is no 'me' card in the iOS address book is because apps can then not find out who you are. Strange solution of course.

Or they did that because of some stupid patent.

moe3• 14 years ago

Why do people expect that Apple respond realtime to these kinds of things?

I think most people don't expect apple to respond at all. At least that's their standard practice with bug reports sent directly to them.

7402• 14 years ago

I filed my first bug report on Sunday, 3 days ago. I got a response today.

I've been a registered Apple Developer for about a year.

vaksel• 14 years ago

agreed..it's like people never dealt with anyone from a big corporation before...it always takes a while to get a response...and something like would require decision making from multiple executives...they probably just waited till the next meeting to bring it up

Devilboy• 14 years ago

Apple ALWAYS takes a few days to officially respond to issues like this one. A week is about average. I guess they really have high-level people considering their moves from a PR perspective, or maybe they like to run stuff past their lawyers first or something.

brodd• 14 years ago

One of the worst things I know of is "news" ending with "<someone> wasn't immediately available for comment".

richardlblair• 14 years ago

It's about time. It is their platform, their OS, and their users. It is their responsibility to respond to potential threats accordingly. This is the right thing to do.

Good decision Apple.

cewawa4• 14 years ago

Seems to me the flaw in the plan here is that we're talking about asking the user for permission, when we should be asking the contact. I don't want Path to have my contact details, but anyone who has me in their address book is able to provide them. Asking the user for address book permission doesn't fix that.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

The issue you describe is not "fixable" in principle.

cewawa4• 14 years ago

You can discover friends using a service without allowing wholesale access to address books.

harryh2• 14 years ago

You're basically asking for DRM on your contact details. That's not going to work.

cewawa4• 14 years ago

Um, you proposed "DRM on your contact details", not me.

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

And how is Apple going to go about securing the permission the people LISTED in the address book for their personal data to be harvested.

Address books are out of bounds. End discussion.

Permission fail.

artursapek• 14 years ago

Considering all the apps that like to use the phone numbers and emails to help new users find their friends using the app it's a difficult decision.

I think a good compromise would be allowing an app access to phone numbers or emails without the rest of the information, eg whose number that is, their street address, etc. Then, giving your own number when you sign up could be an option. That way a new user's app could connect them to those friends of theirs who have opted to attach their name to their number.

reddit_clone3• 14 years ago

Jesus Christ.

With so many people syncing with their corporate groupware with their iPhones, how is this not a howling, category 10, shitstorm yet?

polemic• 14 years ago

Will existing [installed] apps be required to ask for permission if it has not previously been explicitly granted? Or will they effectively be exempt?

zak_mc_kracken• 14 years ago

The question is: why wasn't this permission asked since version 1.0 of iOS?

Android has had it since day one, isn't it common sense to assume that users might want to approve such access?

antonyh2• 14 years ago

What Android doesn't have is the ability for the user to deny permissions. It does inform the user when installing the software, but there's still no way I can control permissions of Application X and disable it's access to contacts, SMS, and so on.

iOS gives every app the same rights, Android presents a list of permissions without the ability to disable any of them. What's the difference? I suspect that the vast majority of users don't read that list anyway and just click through. Those that do read it and understand it have only two options - ok to everything, or don't use the app.

buff-a• 14 years ago

17.1: Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect user or device data without prior user consent, and then only to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application, or to serve advertising. You may not use analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party.

So. These apps will be removed from the app store immediately, yes?

It is my understanding that a person's address book can be a trade secret, and is protected by law.

xsmasher2• 14 years ago

I'm surprised that Apple didn't do this four years ago, when an iPhone game was found doing the same thing (and transmitting the data in cleartext.)

http://isource.com/2008/07/23/aurora-feint-removed-from-app-...

The game was removed, but the (obvious) policy change wasn't made.

sutro• 14 years ago

With Congressional involvement this disturbance has now been upgraded to a Category 4 Shitstorm.

frankus• 14 years ago

The whole Address Book framework on iOS seems to have gotten the shit end of the doody stick when they were handing out skilled programmer-hours at Apple.

For example it's inexplicably implemented as a bunch of low-level Core Foundation calls even though it's not remotely a performance bottleneck in any conceivable use case and 90% of the apps using it immediately wrap every query result in some kind of half-baked Objective-C container. And although 99.9% of the code using it wants to use it a simple contacts database, the APIs are designed to be as general as possible and thus are even more needlessly hard to use.

My guess is there has been a "Do something about Address Book on iOS" item on Apple's to-do list for the last couple of years and this permission business always got pigeonholed under that item, until this latest shitstorm demanded a short-term fix.

It's going to be interesting how they implement this for existing apps, since there is no "The user said 'No'" return value for any of the APIs. I guess they're just going to have to return an empty address book or a "record deleted" result code when the user declines access for an app.

antonyh2• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to see what might happen in either of those use-cases for an app which syncs address books with a remote service, such as Google, Yahoo! or CRM tools. It's entirely conceivable that if a user hits no it could have rammifications to other systems which wouldn't expect either of these results.

ansy• 14 years ago

About time. Long overdue.

But how soon is actually soon? 5.0.2 soon? Or 5.1 soon?

I can only wonder how many app developers need to update their apps to remove unnecessary and shady looking address book access. Even worse, I wonder if any popular libraries are slurping address book data that developers don't even know about. Analytics and advertising companies in particular surely couldn't have resisted taking a peek could they? How can you even tell if someone zips up and encrypts your address book? Maybe if you have a jail broken phone modified to detect that, but that's pretty unlikely. Look how many people use Path and we're just now getting wind of it.

yabai• 14 years ago

It is ironic that Apple is supposed to be protecting us by having very rigid policies for what and what does not enter the app store but they let an app access contact data without permission from the user!

Apple will require apps to ask users for permission to address books

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