Apple has eliminated a loophole in the App Store rules that allowed app developers to secretly collect information about the iPhone owner’s contacts.
This feature has existed for developers for years. The application asked the user to give access to a list of contacts — and therefore to phone numbers, addresses and photos of people. This data was then used for marketing, and sometimes sold.
Now application developers are prohibited from forming databases based on a user’s contact list and sharing this information with third parties. Also, you can not first get permission to access the contact list under a third-party pretext, and then secretly change the operation of the application to steal addresses.
Violation of these rules threatens the developer with a ban on the App Store.
As Bloomberg notes, the changes made by Apple were not widely advertised — the corporation clearly did not want to be in the place of Facebook, which it itself criticized for insufficient protection of user data.
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