The issue of access to applications in our iOS is brought back into discussion by those from New York Times which claim that any application that asks for our permission to retrieve the data regarding our location can retrieve all the pictures/films from the photo library of our iDevice. If you have ever used applications that ask you to use a picture with them, then you know that those applications require access to the location system in iOS, so everything that the New York Times says is real but not really that new. The problem is old and it brings into discussion only the cases where the developers would really like to steal the photo libraries of the iDevices because iOS allows them to do this without us knowing.
As it turns out, address books are not the only things up for grabs. Photos are also vulnerable. After a user allows an application on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to have access to location information, the app can copy the user's entire photo library, without any further notification or warning, according to app developers. "Conceivably, an app with access to location data could put together a history of where the user has been based on photo location," said David E. Chen, co-founder of Curio, a company that develops iOS apps. "The location history, as well as your photos and videos, could be uploaded to a server. Once the data is off of the iOS device, Apple has virtually no ability to monitor or limit its use."
Practically using the location information and pictures from the photo library, any ill-intentioned developer could make a map of the places you've been and the things you've seen. As soon as you provide access to location information, applications can transfer data to the developers' servers without much effort and without you knowing about it. It is very possible that some applications already do this, but who could figure out everything that happens in the iDevice without installing a sniffer and watching the traffic?
Unfortunately, Apple did not want to answer some questions from the New York Times and it is normal because Apple turned its back on the famous publication after the articles related to the situation of employees in China. This New York Times article could of course be an attempt to put the company in a bad light even when it announced the iPad 3 presentation event, but the problem is real. I think that any application should ask me if I want to give it access to the photo/video library or not and the same thing should be available for any part of iOS.
