As expected, the United States Congress is taking the iOS application privacy policy situation very seriously. It all started just over a month ago when it was discovered that social sharing application Path was storing some aspects of a user’s address book without their permission. While Path only uses this information to help users of the service connect with their friends who also use the service, the fact that this information was taken without permission set off a firestorm of negative sentiment for Path.
Also back in February, Congress started to put some heat on Apple regarding their application developer policies, indicating the practices fall short when it comes to protecting user data. Not satisfied with initial responses provided by Apple, last week Congress demanded Apple provide further details about their privacy policies.
Apple is not the only company Congress has in their sights. The Next Web was forwarded a letter sent to 34 applications featured in the “Social Networking” category of Apple’s App Store. The letter demands that these companies provide Congress with detailed information as to their compliance with Apple’s application privacy policies. Applications selected for this round of scrutiny include Twitter, Tweetbot, FoodSpotting, Turntable.fm, Trover, Instagram, Path, Facebook and SoundCloud.
Developers of these applications will have to provide Congress with a slew of information about their applications. The full gamut of information requested can be found in this letter sent to Tweetbot, and we’ve summarized the more salient questions below:
- Does your application include a privacy policy? If so, how is that policy made available to users?
- Has your application stored address book information? If so, do you notify users about this?
- What information from the address book are you taking, and how are you protecting that information? Why do you store that information?
- Has your application stored any other information from/about a user’s device?
Affected application developers have been given until Thursday, April 12th to respond to the request for information. It is likely that Congress will use the information gathered in a more formal hearing about application/mobile privacy to take place later this year.
[via The Next Web]