Twitter to tighten privacy guidelines

Twitter says it will make privacy guidelines more explicit after it admitted copying entire address books from people’s smartphones and storing the information on its servers, according to reports.

Both the micro-blogging site and Apple, whose iPhone offers the Twitter application (app), have come under fire following the revelation.

Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner told the BBC and Los Angeles Times: “We want to be clear and transparent in our communications with users.

“Along those lines, in our next app updates, which are coming soon, we are updating the language associated with Find Friends — to be more explicit.”

She also said that in place of “Scan your contacts”, the site will use “Upload your contacts” and “Import your contacts” instead, for iPhone and Android apps respectively.

Apple moved to quell the swelling controversy yesterday by saying that it will begin to require iPhone and iPad apps to seek "explicit approval" in separate user prompts before accessing users' address book data.

That came shortly after two members of the US House Energy and Commerce committee requested the company to provide more information about its privacy policies.

"Apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines," a Apple spokesman said. "We're working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release."

In a letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook, two Representatives asked Apple yesterday to clarify its developer guidelines and the measures taken by the company to screen apps sold on its App Store.

The letter came after Path, a San Francisco startup that makes a Facebook-like social networking app, attracted widespread criticism last week after a Singaporean developer discovered that Path's iPhone app had been quietly uploading his contacts' names and phone numbers onto Path's servers.

In the following days, other technology bloggers discovered that iPhone apps like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Foodspotting similarly uploaded user data - without permission, in some cases.The Path incident "raises questions about whether Apple's iOS app developer policies and practices may fall short when it comes to protecting the information of iPhone users and their contacts," the letter said.

The legislators' request for information cast the spotlight squarely onto Apple for the first time since an independent blogger, Dustin Curtis, wrote in a widely distributed post last week that "there's a quiet understanding among many  iOS app developers that it is acceptable to send a user's entire address book, without their permission to remote servers and then store it for future reference."

Mr Curtis blamed Apple, writing that he could not "think of a rational reason for why Apple has not placed any protections on Address Book in iOS".

Agencies