History to be told, there have been many application on the App Store who access address book without your consent. An example of one of these applications is Path who loaded the address book of its users onto their servers. However, later on, the company apologized for the same on their blog. Undoubtedly, Apple takes privacy of its users seriously and they decided to take into a whole new level with its enhancement in privacy settings.
In iOS 6, if any of your third party application access Address book, reminders, calendars and infact photos, you would be thrown with a dialog box whether to grant permission to the application to access them or not. Also, once you have granted the access, you could take the authority back with the help of new privacy settings inside settings.app. In the privacy settings, it would show which one of your applications are using Locations, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders and Photos.
Apple has finally showed in its first iOS 6 Beta how much it cares for its users when it comes to privacy. Neverthless, Apple had once mysteriously collected the location based data for a future project which we think is the upcoming maps applications in iOS 6. If you are a developer, you could download the iOS 6 Beta, start testing out the compatibility of your applications and use all the features.
Let’s know your thoughts in the comment section.