Why I won’t stop using Path
I love Path. Primarily because of its mindblowingly beautiful design but also because of the idea behind it: A social network, only for your close friends and family. I would never add a single person to Path that I don’t fully trust (and I haven’t, so far).
Yesterday some developer guy discovered, that the app sends the users complete address-book to Paths servers. Path does this in order to notify you when somebody you know joins the service. Sounds okay, right? The problem is: This feature isn’t opt-in from the start. And to make matters even worse Path doesn’t encrypt any of that data. Result: Huge PR blow. Lots of people getting angry, stating they are going to quit the service. I think that’s ridiculous.
First of, Path is not the first app that does uploads the users address-book. And it isn’t the first service that violates privacy laws as a result (right, Zuck?). The fact that Path wants to be your most intimate of all the social networks popping up makes for a bad impression, without a question. But let’s look at how the company handled the criticism.
“We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.
We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.”
To summarize:
- The CEO himself commented on the developers blogpost. Just great. I wish every company was that open and quick when dealing with such issues.
- They realized the problem with this feature before the blogpost went up. If the developer had tried this one or two weeks later this whole thing wouldn’t have happened in the first place.
- At the moment it doesn’t seem that Path wants to make money from their users’ data directly. Instead they focus on in-app purchases.
I don’t see why I should quit using an app I’ve come to love and I really hope it continues to grow hugely.
[Update] Dave Morin, CEO of Path, wrote a blogpost in which he apologized. He also said that “as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers”. Hey Facebook, how about you take a page from Paths book?
