A copy of the phone numbers and names in your address book (but not emails, notes or any other personal information in your address book) will be stored on our servers and will only be used to: (a) notify you when your contacts become active on Viber, (b) indicate which of your contacts is already a Viber user, (c) correctly display the name of each contact as it appears in your address book when a call is received.Path's privacy policy, on the other hand, is not so upfront. In fact, the link to its privacy policy is nowhere to be found on the homepage. That could explain the lack of awareness its users have on the app's data collection behavior, and the subsequent uproar when the fact is revealed, by a third-party.
Path Changes Direction on Privacy
Path, the mobile-exclusive personal social network, was in the middle of the limelight when it was discovered that the startup collects and stores address book data of its users without consent. According to the company's blog post, "the use of this information is limited to improving the quality of friend suggestions when you use the ‘Add Friends’ feature and to notify you when one of your contacts joins Path." I'm not a developer, but if I understand the statement correctly, in order for Path to notify you when any of your contacts join the network, instantaneously, it has to first know who are your contacts. This will only work when the network has your address book data on its servers. Viber, a popular VoiP app for iOS and Android, has a similar feature. Whenever a contact of mine joins the service, I'll be notified instantly by a push notification. A check on its privacy policy reveals that, just like Path, it's also storing our address book data: