Apple restricts apps from handling and sharing user's information including contact lists

Apple's latest guidelines to developers restrict apps about how they handle user information on the Apple store. Now with these guidelines in place, the developers can no longer sell user information to third-party companies.

The latest guidelines prohibit the developers from creating a database of users information. This data can be anything from contacts in their address book or accessed information stored by any app in the smartphone. The new guidelines now ask the developers to get user consent for any information access from the phone, and selling user data to a third party is completely prohibited.

According to a report by Bloomberg, these changes in the guidelines are not in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal about Facebook's misuse of user information.

Notably, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been vocal about criticising the social media platform for selling user data to third parties for research purpose without seeking user consent.

Data shared by Facebook allegedly included phone contacts, messages in the smartphone, user location, and users' interests based on search.

Coming back to Apple's latest guidelines, the company has also included a ban on cryptocurrency mining apps in Apple Store in their guidelines. Apps which describe or work as crypto miners in the background will be blocked from the Apple Store with immediate effect.

A section about power efficiency (2.4.2) and a separate cryptocurrency section (3.1.5) of the guidelines refers to cryptocurrency mining. These apps will not be allowed to run in the background for mining purposes, as they affect device performance and battery life. These sections have a set of rules that describe how these apps should and shouldn't work in relation to cryptocurrencies.

However, Crypto Wallet apps are fine under these guidelines. These apps can't offer cryptocurrency as a reward for downloading other apps from the store. Cloud-based mining and off device mining apps are also not allowed.