The advent of social networks and cloud computing have brought with them questions about privacy and security, both from technical and ethical standpoints. This was brought to the forefront again this past week, as many iOS users might know, when a social network called Path was found to be uploading its users’ contact information without notifying them that it was doing so.

The reaction in the online media was pretty much one of condemnation. Certainly Path made several mistakes. First, they should have alerted users that they were going to upload contact information, request permission to do so, and inform them as to exactly why they were doing this and what they were doing with this information. They also should not have sent the information to their servers in plain text rather than as encrypted data, because doing so allows anyone on a public Wi-Fi network to potentially gain access to your contact data if they are sniffing network traffic at the time the contact information is sent to Path’s servers.

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