How iPhone Apps Steal Your Contact Data and Why You Can’t Stop It

Nothing really new in this article, but it’s useful to be reminded of how valuable our data is to those who want to make money off it (without our permission).

Apple allows any app to access your address book at any time—it’s built into the iPhone’s core software. The idea is to make using these apps more seamless and magical, in that you won’t have dialog boxes popping up in your face all the time, the way Apple zealously guards your location permissions at an OS level—because fewer clicks mean a more graceful experience, right? Maybe, but the consequence is privacy shivved and consent nullified. Even Steve Jobs thinks so. Your phone makes decisions about what’s okay to share with a company, whose motivation is, ultimately, making money, without consulting you first. —How iPhone Apps Steal Your Contact Data and Why You Can’t Stop It.

After reading this article, I tried to remove my contact data from Twitter (see the tiny link “remove”?)

but got this error message: “Oops, we couldn’t remove your contacts at this time.”