I'm surprised it even took this long for this to happen. Developers have swarmed so fast to write the coolest iPhone application that privacy and security concerns were probably not a high priority.
Gizmodo reports that an RPG game called Aurora Feint has been delisted from the Apple store for bad security practices. The offense? The game takes your entire contact list and sends it unencrypted to their servers. The developers claim that their intents have been noble:
When we discovered that the Apple SDK allowed us to look through your contact list we thought it would be a great idea to automatically show you which friends are playing the game. Why automatically? Well, everyone always complains about the keyboard on the iPhone and how annoying it is to type on it. So we thought, "Hey, why don't we make this feature REALLY easy to use – no typing!" And such, the community feature was born. Some people have said that it would have been ok if we had a better notice explaining what was going on. I agree! We weren't trying to be sneaky about how this worked. It was just overlooked. No one we showed it to even asked a question about it – nor did we. It just simply never came up as a potential issue when we beta tested the game with early users.