No, don't leave the app developers alone. Apple has merely failed to protect its customers; it is Path, Instagram, Voxer, and whoever else who have actively taken advantage of this lack of protection to abuse the trust of their users. Yes, Apple could do more to protect their customers, but the fault lies with those people who are uploading address books without permission.
When I install an application on my computer, I do not expect it to upload arbitrary information from my disk to the developer's servers. If an application did, I would be quite upset, even though any application that I run on my computer will generally have access to all of my data with no substantial platform-provided protection.
Why should I suddenly give the developers a break because the application is running on the computer I carry around in my pocket, instead of the computer I put in my lap?
Would you forgive a company if their application grabbed your cookies, and uploaded those to their server, so that they could log into your Gmail account to find your contact information? Decided to upload all of your documents to their servers and convert them to a convenient HTML format to make it easy for you to share them with one click to your friends? Rooted around your hard disk, uploading your tax information to their servers?
So why do you say that we should forgive companies for making the deliberate decision to grab private information from your phone, and upload it to their servers, just because the platform vendor never implemented a feature to explicitly forbid that?
one might argue that by not protecting the user's personal data by default, when how to protect such information is quite well known, the vendor and market maker is clearly the liable party
Would you argue this for your desktop or laptop as well? For any breach due to you installing an application from someone who abused your trust to read your files and upload them, that your OS vendor (Microsoft, Apple, your Linux distro, or whatnot) is the liable party?
When I install an application on my computer, I do not expect it to upload arbitrary information from my disk to the developer's servers. If an application did, I would be quite upset, even though any application that I run on my computer will generally have access to all of my data with no substantial platform-provided protection.
Why should I suddenly give the developers a break because the application is running on the computer I carry around in my pocket, instead of the computer I put in my lap?
Would you forgive a company if their application grabbed your cookies, and uploaded those to their server, so that they could log into your Gmail account to find your contact information? Decided to upload all of your documents to their servers and convert them to a convenient HTML format to make it easy for you to share them with one click to your friends? Rooted around your hard disk, uploading your tax information to their servers?
So why do you say that we should forgive companies for making the deliberate decision to grab private information from your phone, and upload it to their servers, just because the platform vendor never implemented a feature to explicitly forbid that?