Chris Dixon

iphone platform governance isn’t good enough. no one has good enough platform governance, although i think amazon is going to be the best of the worst, at least according to my personal preferences. the only way platform governance can be improved is if there is a greater focus on niche models, not the one world approach of amazon, apple, google, facebook, twitter, etc. platforms with no focus on customer segmentation are vulnerable to niche platforms focused on a specific customer type. 

Kik became hugely successful using this trick. Apologize later. You do what you gotta do. You’re not taking the info and using it maliciously, you’re doing it to grow faster.

Peter Cooper was on Founders Talk the other week and talked about when he started ruby weekly, he launched with #4. Sneaky stuff. I personally have no problem with that, cause I’ve done things like this before. I actually have a lot of respect for people who do risky things like this. But users are different. When you’ve never had to get the ball rolling on a venture, you tend to fly off the handle on stuff like this. Obviously the Peter Cooper situation is different than the contact list stealing, but it’s along the same lines. 

Here’s that interview with Peter Cooper. http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/30 

Re #3, Path (and other apps I know of that were doing this) have never had this problem — they always uploaded the address book over HTTPS. Of course, you’re right that this doesn’t matter too much; it mostly makes bad-behaving apps harder to detect.

IMHO, a good compromise would be for iOS to provide something like SHA1(app_id, email) for each contact — that way, apps could provide low-friction friend-matching, with far less potential for abuse.

hey Chris – there’s a pretty significant problem with #2 that many commenters (including the dude talking to Dave originally) missed. IF you want to scale your business internationally – just hashing locally on the device and then comparing the hashes server side will not work…unless you duplicate international number cleaning on every client.

By number cleaning I mean the process of converting 07832 555121 (in say a UK user’s address book) to +44 7832 555121

The US version of this problem are the differences between +1 212 555 1212 and 212 555 12121 or even 001 212 555 1212

To use WhatsApp as an example – clearly the main aim of duplicating the database is exactly what you and some commenters have already identified – telling you that one of your friends just joined ….(and simultaneously telling them)

What companies like WhatsApp do is quite a bit more intrusive than just using this information for spamming any new friend with a “hello” request – is the fact that they’ll say stuff like “Last use by Jonathan yesterday at 6pm.” – even if that communication at 6pm was NOT with you.

In other certain aspects of personal data and behaviour get communicated with no questons asked.

You are completely correct that ALL you need to compare is a phone number – and in point of fact you don’t really need to store it. You just need to compare it every so often – so there are clearly better and more elegant ways to organise this than the

Spam.
Apologise. 
Ask user for permission to spam – and assume user will agree.
Rinse and repeat…