Path CEO: 'We thought we were doing this the right way'

"We thought we were doing this the right way. It turns out, we made a mistake."
Dave Morin, the CEO and creator of social media app Path, tells me this as we sit in his 22nd-floor headquarters in downtown San Francisco. It's a mere 24 hours after an independent app developer exploded Morin's world with a simple blog post that led to a torrent of bad publicity.
Arun Thampi of Singapore discovered that Path uploads users' address book information to Path's servers. This action isn't in Path's Terms of Use, and it's enraged a user community concerned about privacy rights.
Some social media companies, including Path, subscribe to a philosophy that says access to your personal data — if used safely and in the right way — can only improve your experience. To this extent, address book data is the bread and butter of Path, an app that distinguishes itself as "the first truly personal network."
"We don't want to connect you with just anyone on Path," Morin says. "Without the contact list information, some of these features just don't work."
The address book data, Morin says, is used in only three ways. "We give you a list of suggested friends to connect with who are already on Path. We notify you when other friends of yours join Path." And the third reason speaks to the very uniqueness of Path itself — its "Friend Rank" algorithm.
FriendRank uses data on your phone to determine the most helpful friending suggestions. The feature looks at the interaction you have with friends across platforms, so, in theory, you'll get the most relevant friend suggestions possible without the chaff that Facebook, for one, may serve up.
"We used the data for the sake of simplicity," Morin tells me. "Any time you build a network, you have to help users find their friends. And that entire experience is designed to suggest people who you're close to." In other words, it's the whole point of the app itself.
But that's not an easy sentiment to convey to users who feel their privacy has been violated. Morin told me he wants to take all measures possible — all explained in a blog post — to prove to users that Path is serious about privacy. "We've deleted the entire collection of user contact information from our servers," Morin says. "Unlike some other companies, we believe that users should have complete control over their data. This is just the right thing to do."

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