If apps spelled everything they were doing out for you all as you seem to want, you'd have something equivalent to a TOS to read. Only instead of legal jargon it would be technical jargon. You'd never read it. And then when it came out that the app was doing something that was described in it, you'd bitch and moan and complain just like you are doing now.
I would venture to guess that a large majority of apps in the app store (iOS and Android) do the same thing Hipster, Path and other mentioned in this thread do and you don't even know. I don't even what to know what Google and Apple themselves are doing without telling anyone.
What a stupid response. I'm not a huge privacy advocate but this is a massive breach of trust/privacy. Not only are apps taking your personal contact information but the contact information of everyone you have in your address book. So regardless of your stance on privacy, the privacy of all of your contacts is also at stake.
If I thought these companies were going to do something malicious with the data then it would be an issue. These companies aren't spammers. They aren't criminals. They don't plan to do anything malicious with the data. Your privacy, my privacy or any of my contacts privacy isn't at risk. It's not at risk but I don't think someone at Hipster is going through the data and using it in any way.
I'll accept the point that maybe hipster or path are not (yet) sifting through the data they obtained, however, sometimes startups go bankrupt and someone buys whatever assets are left over. Address data may get sold to a buyer with a different view of privacy. Servers may get hacked and data gets lost. Keep in mind that if you're using hipster/path you're not only risking your data but also the private data of anyone you have in your address book. It's one thing if friends of mine decide that they hand out their phone number, it's another thing if they decide to hand out mine.
hey may not be using it maliciously (I don't think they are either) but they should be handling our data more carefully. And it's possible that they may use this data in the future.
The part you should be worried about is the fact that they are taking the contact info of your friends and family. People who trusted you enough to give you their data. You/we the users should not get to make the judgement call as to whether or not we are going to give their data up.
This is false, they do not send a recorded record of your movements to apple, however they do send GPS+WLAN BBSID correlation data back to apple,[1] they claim the processed is anonymized, but there are very powerful deanonymization techniques that can be applied to large data sets. [2][3][4]
I live in almost the middle of nowhere, i guarantee nothing like google maps, etc has ever passed this way to map my WIFI point's BSSID onto a physical location, yet the week a member of my family got an iphone, plugging the BSSID into a location api gives the exact location of my house...
Here's more useless analytical evidence to suggest that most people don't know everything: when Samy Kamkar[0] first demonstrated geolocation via BSSIDs, I tried out every wireless router in my house, including one that had not been plugged into a wall in over 4 years and never at my current residence, long before Google started wardriving for street maps and well before the first iPhone came out. He was able to accurately map it to my old residence. That means that sometime before December of 2006, someone or something was able to snatch my BSSID from someplace, accurately note it's physical location in the world, and store that away in some database that was used almost 4 years later. I can guarantee you it was not Apple, and I'd be damned surprised if it was Google at that time.
The data was stored on the phone, not sent to Apple, and certainly not to advertisers.
The data was used for GPS assistance -- it was a cache that triangulated your location from cell phone towers to help get a faster GPS lock (and to find your location without GPS if you’re getting bad GPS signal).
If you're concerned about the police finding out your moves, they have access to such information from the tellcos themselves with your cell number, whereas to use those stored GPS logs they would need physical access to your iPhone.
I would venture to guess that a large majority of apps in the app store (iOS and Android) do the same thing Hipster, Path and other mentioned in this thread do and you don't even know. I don't even what to know what Google and Apple themselves are doing without telling anyone.
TL;DR: Get over it. Move on.