"We thought we were doing this the right way. It turns out, we made a mistake." Dave Morin, the CEO and creator of social media app Path, tells me this as we sit in his 22nd-floor headquarters in downtown San Francisco. It's a mere 24 hours after an independent app developer exploded Morin's world with a simple blog post that led to a torrent of bad publicity. Arun Thampi of Singapore discovered that Path uploads users' address book information to Path's servers. This action isn't in Path's Terms of Use, and it's enraged a user community concerned about privacy rights.Users upset that Path uploads users' address book information to Path's serversWithout contact info, some of these features just don't work, CEO saysWe're growing accustomed to handing over our data to social media services
Some social media companies, including _, subscribe to a philosophy that says access to your personal data — if used safely and in the right way — can only improve your experience.