Breaking: Apple quietly changed its rules to prohibit iPhone app developers from creating databases of people's contact information and sharing it with third parties bloomberg.com/news/articles/… w/ @markgurman
Consumers might not fully understand what happens when they share contacts with a developer. The developer can get anything they've stored about those contacts, not just phone numbers. It's job, home address, thumbnail pic, creation & modification date of contact, etc.
The developer gets this info in a way that is untracked by Apple. If users turn off a developers' access to contacts info, it just turns off the data faucet, but it doesn't delete what a developer already has. 
It's worth noting that Apple has criticized Facebook for FB's privacy lapses, which involved a developer gathering friend info from users (allowed at the time) and then sharing with a third party (not allowed at the time). Apple CEO Tim Cook has called privacy a human right.
If you want to see the info developers can have on your friends/family/etc when you share contacts, it's listed here: developer.apple.com/documentation/… Basically just whatever you've put into those fields. The new rules don't ban that sharing, just ban storing/selling data to 3rd party.
