Path Uploads Your Entire Address Book to Its Servers

Blogger Arun Thampi accidentally discovered that Path uploads your entire address book to its servers. Path CEO quickly explained why the company chose to take this path (pun intended):

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.

The app that everybody loved a few months ago is now the app that everybody loves to hate. I’m sure it won’t last long though. Path will fix “the glitch” and get praised by everyone for how quickly they came through. But that’s only assuming MG Siegler or Gruber don’t put them on the gallows first.