Yesterday it was revealed that the popular social networking app Path was uploading entire iPhone address books to the company’s server. The data uploaded included full names, phone numbers and email addresses, and the app uploaded all this data without ever asking for permission. Dave Morin, Path’s co-founder and CEO, admitted fault on Wednesday through the company’s website and announced an update to allow users to either opt in or out of the contact collection feature. “We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words,” Morin said. “So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.” The company maintains that when data is transmitted to its servers, it is always sent securely through an encrypted connection and protected by industry-standard firewalls.

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A recent study showed that social networks like Twitter and Facebook are potentially more addictive than cigarettes or alcohol, and now we may have an idea why. A group of scientists from MIT in Massachusetts, IULM University in Milan and two other laboratories in Italy found that people showed physical and psychophysiological responses while using Facebook similar to those exhibited by people while playing a musical instrument or engaging in other creative activities. Beyond wanting to use Facebook for obvious reasons such as keeping up with friends and sharing photos, people may actually be seeking out the chemical responses they experience while browsing social networks. Read on for more.

The team of scientists measured skin conductance, blood volume pulse, electroencephalogram, electromyography, respiratory activity and pupil dilation in 30 subjects as they viewed photos of nature, attempted to solve math problems and then as they browsed Facebook. The results showed a clear psychophysiological pattern.

“Statistical analysis of the psychophysiological data and pupil dilation indicates that the Facebook experience was significantly different from stress and relaxation on many linear and spectral indices of somatic activity,” the group’s report states. “Moreover, the biological signals revealed that Facebook use can evoke a psychophysiological state characterized by high positive valence and high arousal (Core Flow State).”

As a result, the scientists hypothesize that the rapid growth being seen among big social networks can be attributed at least in part to positive physical and psychophysiological responses users experience while browsing sites like Facebook.

Path, the popular social network that competes with the likes of Instagram, may be uploading your iPhone’s entire address book up to its servers. Arun Thampi from mclov.in noticed the Path app’s steal data dump while trying to create a Mac OS X application for the social network during a hackathon. “Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path,” Thampi said, noting that Path didn’t ever ask for permission to do so. It’s unclear why Path is uploading the iPhone’s entire address book, but Thampi noticed that the social network performs the action during an API call with basic HTTP authentication. It remains unclear if Path’s Android application is also guilty of uploading personal information. Thampi has instructions on how to catch Path in the action on his blog.

UPDATE: A response from Path’s CEO follows after the break.

Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

Dave Morin
Co-Founder and CEO of Path

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A new study suggests that social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol. A team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Wurtzburg, Germany to analyze the addictive properties of social media and other vices. Participants in the week-long study were polled via BlackBerry smartphones seven times per day and asked to report when they experienced a desire within the past 30 minutes, and whether or not the succumbed to that desire. They were also asked to gauge each desire on a scale from mild to “irresistible.”

In total, 10,558 responses were recorded and a total of 7,827 “desire episodes” were reported by participants. The results of the team’s study will soon be published in the Psychological Science journal, however preliminary data provided to The Guardian suggests the highest rate of “self-control failures” were tied to social media services.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Wilhelm Hofmann, the leader of team conducting the study. Hofmann suggests people may fail to resist social media so much because there is no obvious or immediate downside to checking services like Twitter or Facebook. He does warn that these services can ultimately be a huge drain on users’ time, however.

“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann said. ”With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”

President Obama will be hosting his first Google+ hangout tonight at 5:30 p.m. Eastern. In the discussion, the president will be answering questions that were submitted over the past few weeks through YouTube. Google maintains that the White House has had no role in which questions will be selected. Google’s team will instead choose the top-rated questions among those submitted, ensuring there will be several different issues discussed. The event will take place in the Roosevelt Room of the White House and is scheduled to last 45 minutes. The hangout will also be streamed on the White House’s web site, and reporters and press cameras not permitted inside during the event. Obama has previously hosted town hall meetings on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, all of which received harsh criticism and claims that the President ignored subjects that drew the most questions.

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Facebook announced on Tuesday that the company’s Timeline feature will be forced on users “over the next few weeks.” Facebook introduced the Timeline feature last year, which transforms a profile page into a timeline of a user’s life, highlighting photos, posts and life events that help tell the user’s story. Once activated, people will have seven days to preview the Timeline content before it goes live on the account. Last week, Facebook added a feature that enabled apps to populate timelines with new information, such as a virtual passport to share a user’s favorite locations.

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Motorola Mobility announced on Wednesday that its Motorola Mobility Ventures arm has invested in a social networking startup called Shaker. The firm, based in Israel, says its social network is “similar to interacting in the physical world,” and that it “creates a natural setting using your Facebook profile and allows people to meet around mutual friends and shared interests.” Motorola’s MOTOBLUR user interface found on several of its Android smartphones allows users to access multiple social network profiles, but early versions weren’t greeted warmly by users. Motorola may use Shaker to spice things up a bit in future versions of the UI. “Shaker’s innovative platform gives consumers the ability to not only interact with each other, but with brands in groundbreaking ways that could never before have been accomplished on a social network,” Mony Hassid, managing director of Motorola Mobility Ventures, said. It is unclear how much Motorola Mobility Ventures invested in Shaker. A full press release follows after the break.

Motorola Mobility Ventures Invests in Shaker

Award-winning start-up specializes in evolving social networking experiences

Jan. 18, 2012

LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. – Jan. 18, 2012 – Motorola Mobility, Inc. (NYSE: MMI), through its strategic investment arm Motorola Mobility Ventures, today announced that it has invested in Shaker, the award-winning start-up that recreates social experiences online.

For the first time, Shaker allows people to socialize in a casual and fun way online. Similar to interacting in the physical world, Shaker creates a natural setting using your Facebook profile and allows people to meet around mutual friends and shared interests. Currently, the Israeli-based start-up’s offering is only available to users in Israel. Shaker is planning to launch in the United States in the first quarter of 2012, and has recently opened offices in New York and San Francisco.

“Shaker is the next step in social networking online,” said Mony Hassid, managing director, Motorola Mobility Ventures. “Shaker’s innovative platform gives consumers the ability to not only interact with each other, but with brands in groundbreaking ways that could never before have been accomplished on a social network.”

“As more people start using social media sites on their smart phones, Motorola Mobility offers us exciting support and expertise to expand on all platforms,” said Yonatan Maor, co-founder and CEO of Shaker. “Motorola Mobility’s support will enable Shaker to offer an amazing experience across all devices.”

Shaker won the prestigious Startup Battlefield contest at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September 2011, and announced $15 million Series A funding a few weeks later.

If you turned on your television over the holidays you most likely encountered one of many Google advertisements. The Mountain View company has been pushing brand awareness with commercials highlighting Chrome web browsing, Google Search and social networking on Google+. It would appear the advertising is paying off, as Google+ is reportedly adding new users at a rapid pace. The social networking site has over 62 million users and is adding 625,000 new users each day according to unofficial Google+ statistician Paul Allen. What is astonishing is that nearly a quarter of all Google+ users joined in December alone. If the rate of new sign-ups continues, Allen predicts that Google+ will reach 100 million users on February 25th, 200 million users on August 3rd, and will finish 2012 with 293 million users. However, he also believes that 2012 will be the breakout year for the social networking site, and that it could reach more than 400 million users by the end of the year. Impressive nonetheless, Allen’s numbers only show how many people are signing up for Google + and there is no indication how frequently those users actually make use of their accounts regularly.

[Via CNET]

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Microsoft officially took the wraps off of its new social network for students on Thursday. The service is called So.cl and was developed by Microsoft Research’s FUSE Labs division. It’s currently in “experimental” stages and is available to students attending the University of Washington, New York University and Syracuse University. So.cl allows users to log-in with their Facebook accounts and offers a similar set of features. In addition to adding status updates, photos and links, users can also join “video parties” to watch movies and chat with a group of friends. “So.cl is not meant to replace existing full-featured search and social networking tools,” Microsoft said on its So.cl FAQ page. “It is an experimental research project using a minimal set of features which help combine search with the social network for the purpose of learning.”

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Flipboard, the popular magazine-style news application originally made available for the iPad is now available for iPhone as well. Flipboard allows users to flip through a single feed of articles and photos that have been shared across various social networks. It can also display stories from a variety of news categories including technology, design, “Flipboard picks,” photography, business, sports, style, travel, food and more. The user interface is among the best we’ve ever seen on a casual news application. Android and Windows Phone users may want to check out Pulse for a similar experience, though Pulse isn’t quite as impressive and novel as Flipboard. Flipboard for iPhone is free and is available in the App Store now.

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Gowalla on Monday confirmed it was recently acquired by Facebook. “About two months ago, my co-founder Scott and I attended F8,” Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams wrote on the company blog Monday. “We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments. A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team to have the biggest impact was to work together. So we’re excited to announce that we’ll be making the journey to California to join Facebook.” Gowalla will begin to “wind down” its services in January but will allow users to export their passport and pin data, stamp collections and photos. Williams said Facebook is not acquiring Gowalla’s user data. Neither Facebook nor Gowalla discussed the terms of the acquisition.

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Facebook settled a privacy lawsuit with the Federal Trade Commission on Friday and agreed to submit independent audits for the next 20 years. The FTC had accused the social network of being deceptive in its privacy practices, Reuters explained. ”Facebook’s innovation does not have to come at the expense of consumer privacy,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said. Facebook will create two positions dedicated to privacy, including a chief privacy officer. In addition, Reuters said the social network must be transparent about what it does with personal user data in the future and it must receive user permission before changing how it shares private user data. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he “is committed to making Facebook the leader in transparency and control around privacy.”

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Foursquare announced on Wednesday that it has updated its client to version 4.0 with support for iOS 5. The update will provide users with access to a brand new “Radar” feature that takes advantage of iOS 5′s region monitoring capabilities to automatically alert you of destinations nearby that you might be interested in. If a friend or family member has checked in nearby, it will alert you that he or she is just around the corner. “When you’re in a new city, Radar can let you know about about cool places around you, even though you’ve never been before,” foursquare’s lead iPhone developer Anoop Ranganath told BGR. Foursquare for iPhone 4.0 is available in the iTunes App Store now and the update is free.

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The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and seven other privacy groups have contacted the U.S. Federal Trade Commission asking it to investigate Facebook for “secretly tracking users after they logged off of Facebook’s webpage.” A 34-page complaint filed by EPIC asks for an injunction, investigation and “other relief” from the social network. EPIC said Facebook is home to more than 60 billion photographs and alleges it developed its “tag suggestions” feature to collect data on Facebook users “without knowledge of consent in order to develop facial recognition technology.” The complaint specifically states:

Given these extraordinary circumstances, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, The Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, urge the Commission to investigate Facebook, determine the extent of the harm to consumer privacy and safety, require Facebook to cease collection and use of users’ biometric data without their affirmative opt-in consent, require Facebook to give users meaningful control over their personal information, establish appropriate security safeguards, limit the disclosure of user information to third parties, and seek appropriate injunctive and compensatory relief.

EPIC’s letter also details how the social network violates its own terms of service and shows how hard it is for a user who has been tagged in a photo to delete the original image which, in most cases, is owned by somebody else. EPIC wants Facebook to create a detailed privacy program and to immediately suspend its face-tagging feature.

[Via AP]

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Google recently announced that its Google+ social network is now available to anyone who wants to join. The search engine giant noted that it has added 91 changes during the social network’s beta trial, which lasted just under 90 days, and that it is deploying nine new changes on Tuesday. Among the most notable additions, the Hangouts video chat feature is now available for Android smartphones running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or newer. Here is a list of several other key changes:

• A new “Hangouts on Air” option allows users to live broadcast to up to nine different people.
• Hangouts can now be named.
• A screen sharing function has been added to Hangouts.
• Users can now share and view a sketchpad directly inside Hangouts
• Google Docs can be viewed and shared inside Hangouts.
• Google+ members can now search for other users from the social network directly and Google+ will return results from around the web.
• The Google+ Hangouts API is now available for developers.

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