I told you this evening that a commission of the US Congress asked the Apple company to provide clarifications regarding the access that applications have to the contact book of iDevices. It was inevitable that Apple would introduce new security measures in iOS since Congress is involved and this will happen in the near future. An Apple spokesperson stated for AllThingsDigital that soon a new version of iOS will be available that will have a new warning system that will notify the user when an application tries to access the contact book and will give him the opportunity to deny access.
Apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines, Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. We're working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.
Apple claims that this type of application violates the rules regarding acceptance in the App Store and that in the future update there will be a method to prevent this type of practice. Now Apple admits that the applications violate its rules, but the company knew this for a long time and did nothing, so it bears a very large part of the blame. The problem is that developers have access to many more things in iOS and Apple gives them the opportunity to access them without any kind of restriction, but I assume that a new scandal will be needed to improve the security system of iDevices.
