Apple has made changes to its App Store rules to limit a developer’s ability to use information about iPhone owners’ friends and other contacts.

According to Bloomberg, Apple has quietly closed a loophole that allowed app makes to store and share data without a user’s consent.

Until last week developers were able to ask users for access to their phone contacts for the purpose of using it for marketing or occasionally sharing or selling it.

Locking it down

“They have a huge ecosystem making money through the developer channels and these apps, and until the developers get better on privacy, Apple is complicit," said Appthority president Domingo Guerra.

“When someone shares your info as part of their address book, you have no say in it, and you have no knowledge of it."

Apple’s move to tighten its ruleset follows the General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect on May 25th 2018.

The GDPR aims to strengthen the rights that individuals have regarding personal data relating to them and seeks to unify data protection laws across Europe, regardless of where that data is processed.

Sharing gathered data without consent landed Facebook in trouble earlier this year after millions of people’s data was shared with Cambridge Analytica by an outside developer.