Remember Path? Mobile-only social network thingie that uses a lot more photos than words and you’re supposed to share with your friends and all that? Except that the app that Path runs on turned out to be slurping up your address book and sending its contents, unencrypted, to Path’s headquarters? Remember those guys?
Well, they’re making some very public efforts now having to do with, of all things, privacy. The company announced a new version of its app via a post on its blog.
Path version 2.1.1, which is in the iTunes App Store, enhances security by adding a protective layer called hashing to data sent to Path’s servers. Hashing turns text into an unintelligible string of letters and numbers and in turn anonymizes the information being sent to a server.
“This means last names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Twitter handles and Facebook IDs” will all be hashed, the blog post said.
Could end up being an important moment for Path, which was growing at a nice clip before the scandal. But the scandal was what introduced a lot of people to the existence of Path. Will this fix and the quality of the platform be enough to put it on good footing going forward?
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