Privacy controversy over Path for iPhone, iPad should be a wake-up call

[Commentary] For a country seemingly obsessed with reality television and tabloid journalism, the United States is suddenly very worried about privacy. And I’m not talking about celebrity privacy; I’m talking about your privacy.

The question we should all be asking is why. Why is it necessary for services such as Path to take or hold our data at all? As several developers and writers have pointed out, there are other ways to capture encrypted data. One method is called “hashing,” which creates specific, anonymous strings of numbers and letters from plain text data such as your name or phone number. Using that method, applications pulling the same content will get clear matches while exposing zero user data to a third party. Your data stay private, but you’re still able to find your friends within a service. Hopefully this is the start of a big wake-up call, because it seems clear that we all need to be thinking more seriously about where and how our information is used. If there are better ways to protect privacy, we need to push back hard and make companies adopt those practices. Then we need to keep watching to make sure they stick to it.