14 DAY TRIAL // There's been a lot of talk lately about iPhone apps uploading phone contacts, sometimes without the user knowing and most of the time without their explicit consent. It started out with Path, which bore the brunt of the criticism, after which companies big and small started admitting that they've been doing the same themselves.
None is as big as Twitter though, which has now acknowledged that it too uploads phone contacts via its iPhone app, granted with the user's permission.
Twitter isn't making it very clear though that it uploads the data to its servers and stores it.
In fact, phone contacts may be kept for 18 months after being uploaded. When installing the iPhone Twitter app, users have the option of finding friends on Twitter based on their phone contacts.
The feature is described as "Scan your Contacts for people you already know on Twitter" which sounds innocent enough but is misleading. Twitter not only scans the contacts locally, it creates a copy and keeps them after it's done with the initial scan and search.
However, Twitter has now said that it plans to change the wording on the feature to make it a lot clearer that the contacts are copied.
"In our next app updates, which are coming soon, we are updating the language associated with Find Friends -- to be more explicit. In place of 'Scan your contacts,' we will use 'Upload your contacts' and 'Import your contacts' (in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, respectively)," Twitter told the LA Times.
Users also have the option of removing the existing contacts from the Twitter servers via the dedicated Find Friends page, by using the remove link.
Twitter is hardly alone in the practice, in fact apps that don't upload iPhone contacts and explicitly ask for permissions are the exceptions. This is why Apple finally commented and announced that it plans to make it impossible for apps to access and upload phone contacts without express consent from users.