Apple restricts the collection of user contacts by developers

Apple wants to limit the practice that developers use the address book of users to map contacts, for example to resell the information. To that end, it has made a change to its guidelines for App Store developers.

The change, which is said to have happened last week, was noted by Bloomberg news agency, although Apple did not explicitly highlight it. According to the news agency, Apple is thus ending the age-old practice of developers requesting access to users’ address books in order to use this information for marketing purposes, for their own use or for resale. However, the change does not affect information collected in the past.

The Apple Rules now include a passage under Chapter 5.1.2 stating that you are not allowed to “use information from Contacts, Photos or other APIs that access user data to create a contact database for your own use or sale to third parties’. Nor is it allowed to collect information about other installed apps for marketing or analytics purposes.

An iOS developer tells Bloomberg that users often don’t realize what developers can see once someone has given permission. This would involve data such as names and telephone numbers, but also e-mail addresses, birthdays and home and work addresses, insofar as these have been entered in the address book. Another developer says he is only aware of a single case of this type of data being misused so far.