This week a controversy has come to light surrounding the odious practice of uploading and storing customer address book data without their prior permission. This revelation first hit the news after a blog post by Arun Thampi revealed that Path were practicing this.

Subsequently it has been found out that many major service providers such as Twitter, Instagram, Yelp and Foursquare to name a handful also ingress their customers contacts without any notification.

This outrage has spurred the US Congress to send an open letter to Tim Cook asking him for clarification. Today, Apple agreed with that assessment, and said that soon, apps that use address book data will require explicit user permission to do so.

I can’t help but think this is a little bit locking-the-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted but better late than never I guess.

With all this furore and what appears to be a very widely spread industry practice customers are rightly nervous that their privacy has been compromised and I thought it prudent and timely to state as clearly as possible what customer data Seamonster through it’s whole portfolio of products does and doesn’t store within its databases.

We have a number of apps live right now. The most “social” of these being Opuss – a service allowing people to share all the beautiful words in the world. This app and all our others do not and will not send your address book data to our servers and store them in the “cloud”. We value our users privacy and take every precaution to make sure Opuss is a place for people to have a positive, secure and enjoyable experience.

We don’t and never will abuse the trust that our customers place in us.

If you’re at all interested, Opuss’s Privacy Policy can been viewed here.

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