accidental hacker

parislemon: Path, Not Pathological

As an iOS lover and Path champion, a number of folks have asked for my take on the Path address book situation of yesterday and today. I’ve avoided weighing in for two reasons: first, I wanted to talk to some other actual developers about the situation. Second, the fact that CrunchFund is…

MG Seigler is great at calling people out when they a.) do something shitty, or b.) try to bullshit us. It’s one of the reasons I love reading him so much. In this case, however, Path did something shitty and MG is bullshitting us. It’s time to call him out on it.

MG’s main defense for Path stealing peoples’ address books is that they weren’t being shady, rather, they wanted to “ease the connection building process.” That’s odd. The whole point of Path is that it’s the anti-Facebook. That is, you only share your Path with intimately close friends and family. If I can’t pick them out of my address book myself, I’ve got problems a social app can’t solve.

And, by the way, how the hell is Path going to look at my address book and distinguish my best friend from my plumber? Maybe they’re stealing my phone call history, too.

OK, so let’s pretend they Path is completely benevolent (and I think they are, actually). They were storing our address book data on their servers! What if they got hacked? Most smart and security conscious developers would go out of their way not to store personal data. The minute you store personal data, you take on the responsibility for securing it.

Seigler proceeds to tell us that we shouldn’t be freaking out about Path because so many other applications take advantage of the same API. What?! He also says that Path developers were simply utilizing an option put in front of them. Browser developers have the option to grab our email passwords, but would they? Windows developers have the option to log our keystrokes, but would they? I guess some would.

Just because I leave my keys on the counter doesn’t make it okay for everyone who comes into my house to snag them and make copies. Path made a choice. They chose to be the creepy repairman that copies your keys.

Marco Arment wrote a terrific post about how his app, Instapaper, deals with the address book. Marco gets it. Could he swipe our data? Yes, but he wouldn’t dare.

Lastly, I love how MG calls it “weird” that Apple exposes your address book to developers. If this were an Android story, I think the word would be “sinister.” I’m just sayin’.

Again, I love MG and I usually agree with what he says, but I think he’s letting his loyalties get in the way here, so much so that he’s willing to be hypocritical.

Source: parislemon