Path Uploading Your Private Data – Who The Hell Isn’t?

The biggest story of the last couple of days has been the news that social app Path has been “spying” on you by uploading your address book to their servers. It’s fair to say that all sorts of blogs have been getting in a bit of a tizzy about it to the point where it could pretty much wreck Path’s future chances of success (it could be argued that their chances of mainstream success were fairly limited as it was anyway).

The general gist is that people are surprised that a social app would want to tap into your address book to find your contacts. The hint that they might want to do this is in the words “social” and “mobile”. Are people really stupid enough to think that they wouldn’t have been trying this? You don’t double your user base to 2 million users through word of mouth and people telling their friends about your app while out having a drink together.

These services all have viral hooks built in like this that are tried and tested. Sure the way they were doing it was slightly dodgy and it sounds like there could be a safer workaround, but this sort of stuff happens all the time. Companies sit down and work out how to get more users faster and compete with Facebook’s social graph and this would have been one such instance.

Data is everything these days and it’s the currency that these social web companies trade under. Facebook aren’t worth $100 billion because they have 850 million users. They are worth that much because they have mountains of data on those 850 million users. The rule is pretty simple and we all should be aware of the role that we play: they make the service better so as we can put more of our data in there which, in turn, makes the service better for us and makes them more valuable. It’s a vicious circle. Dave Morin who founded Path knows the game because he pretty much invented the Facebook platform so any notion of it being an innocent mistake is ludicrous. They knew exactly what they were doing.

The bottom line is most people don’t really care about their address book. I certainly couldn’t care less and a whole generation of people under the age of 20 don’t even have a clue what privacy is anymore. In a couple of years, you’ll be connected to your friends by simply scanning your face through a webcam, by powering up your phone, or even by walking into a building.

Companies like Google and Amazon have had tons of information stored on us for years and even the holier than thou Apple were busted tracking people’s phones round last year. The bottom line is bloggers and the general public will keep catching people like Path doing stuff like this, but it won’t matter because the big guys will win in the end.

It’s nearly an unwritten rule of the web now that by using these services you are giving up your data. That is how they make their money and the more data they get their hands on, the richer they become. Path got caught this time but it doesn’t really matter in the greater scheme of things because there are more and more of these companies coming along, they are all after our data and at the end of the day, they are much smarter than us so they’ll end up getting it. Most of them already have it anyway; Path was just unlucky to have a celebrity founder and got caught in the crossfire.