It's interesting that one side effect of the Apple 'walled-garden' and the perceive strictness of the app approval process has led to the idea that:
> ...this issue is a failure of Apple and a breach of trust by Apple, not by app developers.
That's a cop-out, of course. There is no lesser responsibility on the part of an app developer to "do no evil" if you've simply bent your definition of evil to "whatever Apple DOESN'T let me do to their users".
Let's look at this statement:
> ...there's a quiet understanding among many iOS app developers that it is acceptable to...
That should be a big red flag to the writer. Quiet understandings have led to all sorts of problems - certain financial collapses come to mind.
Ultimately, this is something Apple needs to confront. Consistency is far more important that any specific moral position - for users and app developers. But that's not a get out of jail free card for the developer.
> That's a cop-out, of course. There is no lesser responsibility on the part of an app developer to "do no evil" if you've simply bent your definition of evil to "whatever Apple DOESN'T let me do to their users".
That's arguable. Privacy is all about "expectation of privacy," which means there's really no predictable, testable methodology other than implementing a feature and finding out if people are outraged. In fact, it's almost certainly different for apps with different target audiences. Path probably gets a lot of tech-savvy 20- and 30-something users who are outraged by address book sharing, but the average Facebook user probably wouldn't care even if they found out it was happening.
Obviously, this just means that developers should err on the side of openness (e.g. in your privacy policy) and explicitness (e.g. popup dialog asking for permission). But that's often only apparent in hindsight, since a developer may never think that something could even be interpreted as a privacy issue, since the developer knows he or she will never misuse the data or even use it all in any personally-identifiable way.
Presumably, for better or for worse, many developers either consciously or subconsciously trust Apple to have a pulse on the community of users when it comes to privacy. It would be nice to be able to do so, but apparently that can't be trusted. Of course, from the user's perspective, it means they can't trust any app to not be abusive (according to their own definition of "abuse").
"the Apple 'walled-garden' and the perceive strictness of the app approval process"
I wonder if Apple's tight control over app approval has made them actually legally responsible for this kind of thing. Not that it would absolve the app seller/author, but it seems Apple might share significantly in responsibility.
> ...this issue is a failure of Apple and a breach of trust by Apple, not by app developers.
That's a cop-out, of course. There is no lesser responsibility on the part of an app developer to "do no evil" if you've simply bent your definition of evil to "whatever Apple DOESN'T let me do to their users".
Let's look at this statement:
> ...there's a quiet understanding among many iOS app developers that it is acceptable to...
That should be a big red flag to the writer. Quiet understandings have led to all sorts of problems - certain financial collapses come to mind.
Ultimately, this is something Apple needs to confront. Consistency is far more important that any specific moral position - for users and app developers. But that's not a get out of jail free card for the developer.