Following on from my previous blog that talked about Path uploading your entire iPhone address book to its servers, we question whether or not a social network can really ever claim to be ‘private’.

Everyone knows that whatever is said on Twitter is fair game – it is totally public, and you only have yourself to blame if you slip-up. Facebook is a bit of a grey area as it does have privacy settings, but they are very much arranged to encourage you to share your information and habits with lots of other people. If you really wanted to, you could put your Facebook on complete security lock-down, but that would more or less defeat the point of joining Facebook in the first place.

Path, as we have seen in the previous blog, claims to be a more private network, but then they went rifling though everyone’s phone book and stored the data on one of their servers. I think we’ve said enough on that one. Other services such as Flickr and Instagram all host your photos in the cloud, so it can’t justifiably be claimed to be private. It wasn’t that long ago that people would just email pictures to one another, knowing that it would stay between the sender and the recipient, without needing someone else to show them the photo.

This episode with Path illustrates the dangers of signing up to something where applications and networks are actively trying to share things on your behalf. In contrast, at DADapp we maintain that you should have total control over what you share with whom, and not have to rely on a third-party to pass your content to one of your contacts. By providing users with a unique user to user sharing system, we allow people to make direct connections with their contacts. From there they can share files, photos, data etc directly with the contacts that they choose, without having to post anything on an open forum or host their private data in the cloud. You choose which users to connect with, and from there you can share what you want, when you want, with who you want.