Social networking giant Twitter has revealed that it has copied entire address books from smartphones and stored the data on its dedicated servers without users’ knowledge.
It is understood that access to an address book is authorised when users click on the “Find Friends” tab on its smartphone application.
This tab will then search the users’ address book to identify contacts which use the same application and then notify the user.
Other social networking sites including Facebook, FourSquare, Instagram, Foodspotting and Yelp are also reported to have applications which scan users’ address books for details.
Interestingly, with these apps available on iTunes, critics have suggested that Apple has violated its own application terms.
Apple’s guidelines currently state “Apps that read or write data outside its designated container area will be rejected…Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission.”
However, Twitter has now said that it will update the application in order to highlight its privacy policy for users.
It is thought that other social networking sites will follow suit.
