[Routinism]

This is exactly what happened. I never entered my phone number into anything Facebook, and today I received an email that referenced an old phone number of mine being inadvertently released. My strong suspicion is that Facebook crawled a friend's phone contact list, and linked my phone number to my name/Facebook profile.

LinkedIn did something equally as shady with their iOS app. I kept the email addresses of people I met on a trip to Europe on my phone, but never communicated with them. After installing the LinkedIn app on my phone, the "People You May Know" section for my account on the website starts recommending these same people that I met in Europe. I had no idea how this happened until the Path controversy started.

I never consented to anyone stealing my information -- whether it's on my phone or someone else's. What if my social security number or credit card number was stored in my or someone else's contacts? No company has the right to steal this information without consent.

I realize Apple eventually locked down access to Contacts but as far as I'm concerned, that was too little, too late. This never should have been "public" for any app to access, and I really don't think this was just an oversight from the company responsible for the fastest-growing ecosystem ever seen. This was not a misstep...they had to realize that this data could and would get out.

Even worse are the companies that stole from phones while knowing full well that what they were doing was wrong, and that they probably had a small window in which to scrape as much data as possible. Scum.