Path’s CEO, Dave Morin, has issued a genuine and nicely-worded apology to the community today. He acknowledges that there was a lack of communication in how the budding social network treated users’ data, and as of version 2.06 in the iOS App Store both Android and iPhone versions of the app ask you to opt-in to sharing your address book for contact matching.
He’s even gone a step further and purged all existing user information from their servers, so anyone who chooses to opt-in will start with a clean slate. He says, “In the interest of complete transparency we want to clarify that the use of this information is limited to improving the quality of friend suggestions when you use the ‘Add Friends’ feature and to notify you when one of your contacts joins Path––nothing else. We always transmit this and any other information you share on Path to our servers over an encrypted connection. It is also stored securely on our servers using industry standard firewall technology.”
He also admits that they have made, and will continue to make, mistakes when it comes to decisions that affect their users, but they pledge full transparency along the way. It appears that the whole team is contrite and worked hard to clear up this mess before it got too out of hand. Let’s hope other companies learn from this, and preemptively implement privacy procedures before the community attacks.
Source: Path Blog
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