These are all fine and valid points, but the fact remains that a free game app might be very tempted to complement its lousy revenue by stealing and reselling users' address books and anything else their app can get its hands on. I as an iPhone user want a protection against that.
And it's criminal to do so. Software that steals data is malware. Prosecute these companies severely, put their president and the engineers who were in on it in prison for data theft and conspiracy. It's not like there isn't overwhelming evidence proving the case in these situations.
I'm not sure what your point is. Whether or not it's illegal, it should also be protected against by Apple, since it can be prevented entirely that way rather than waiting for someone to get caught and prosecuted for stealing data.
I guess you're saying don't blame Apple, blame the criminals. Okay, I blame the criminals. Crime is always the criminal's fault.
But I'd also like Apple to protect me from them. Especially since the App Store is advertised as a safe place and this view is reinforced by protecting access to other types of private data in the system.
I'm not blaming Apple for the behavior of criminals, but I am blaming Apple for failing to deliver a product that will protect me from them.
There are valid legal reasons to integrate with the address book. The argument that it's apple's fault is like saying WalMart is to blame for shoplifting because they don't put everything behind the counter. It would be very inconvenient to do so and overall things work better when we prosecute crime rather than create a police state environment where crime is not possible, while also making many reasonable actions difficult to do. I don't want to live in the Soviet Union and wait in line for bread.
> There are valid legal reasons to integrate with the address book.
Nobody is suggesting it should be impossible to integrate with contacts. The suggestion is it should be impossible to do so without asking my permission, as is the case with other private data. Requiring that apps ask approval before accessing my private data is not at all like waiting in line for bread in the USSR.
> The argument that it's apple's fault
Is one that nobody is making, so you don't need to debunk it. Or at the very least, I'm not making it, in fact, I very explicitly stated I wasn't making that argument in the post you replied to.
Alternatively, Apple could spend a few thousand dollars and properly secure their MULTI billion dollar platform so the problem couldn't occur in the first place.
It doesn't cost millions to prosecute such a case. Ever if it did, so what. These criminal syndicates engaging in these illegal conspiracies and crimes are well funded, so all costs of prosecution can easily be paid for with fines and seizures.
