Following yesterday’s Path debacle about how the app uploads your entire address book to its servers without your knowledge, jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich decided to do what Apple should have done in the first place: having a notification for when apps try to access your contacts data.
The jailbreak tweak is conveniently called ContactPrivacy and is a free download from Cydia. After installing ContactPrivacy on your iPhone, you won’t find any new icon or settings to tweak…
However, when you use an application that is trying to access your contacts database, ContactPrivacy will notify you and let you choose to allow the app to do so or not.
If you choose to revoke access, Ryan Petrich warns that not all apps recover successfully from having their contacts access revoked. I guess it’s a friendly warning to let you know that if you choose to revoke access to an app, it might not work properly afterwards.
As often, the jailbreak community is much more reactive at protecting users than Apple is.
You can download ContactPrivacy from Ryan Petrich’s repo for free: http://rpetri.ch/repo.