Facebook's issues stem from historical overly-permissive API access that could effectively harvest your graph via a single node's acceptance. Some small facsimile of that is represented by your example but not to the scope it was with Facebook. It's a one-to-many but not a graph. I think this is important natural constraint and a noteworthy distinction. It makes connecting data more of a crapshoot.
Apple is equipped with far more resources at present to deal with app review than Facebook has. They've traditionally been far more draconian about their own rules than has Facebook. This means something like what you describe is less likely to fall through the cracks or propagate the way abuse did with FB in the pre-2014 days.
You're 100% right that any access is effectively a vector, but that's needless reductivism. In 2018 society seems to accept some level of visibility but not unfettered visibility. This is the balance that social media and data gatekeepers will have to contend with.
That said, it doesn't take much to tip the scales these days. People tend to have a healthier skepticism toward the giants of tech these days, and if you burn a little bad PR it can have some terrible consequences. Which is why Facebook has pulled some plugs in a panic on the developer side of things in response.
As has been mentioned countless times in the wake of this kerfuffle, MySpace was the defacto social media company until one day they weren't. It's eas(ier) to introduce competition to Facebook over, say, Apple or Microsoft.
Finally, Facebook's product is, well, data. One could argue that it's a platform and data, but the former is a loss leader for the latter.
So for a number of reasons I find it unlikely that even were Apple to have a PR misstep like this that they'd face the same existential crisis.
Apple is equipped with far more resources at present to deal with app review than Facebook has. They've traditionally been far more draconian about their own rules than has Facebook. This means something like what you describe is less likely to fall through the cracks or propagate the way abuse did with FB in the pre-2014 days.
You're 100% right that any access is effectively a vector, but that's needless reductivism. In 2018 society seems to accept some level of visibility but not unfettered visibility. This is the balance that social media and data gatekeepers will have to contend with.
That said, it doesn't take much to tip the scales these days. People tend to have a healthier skepticism toward the giants of tech these days, and if you burn a little bad PR it can have some terrible consequences. Which is why Facebook has pulled some plugs in a panic on the developer side of things in response.
As has been mentioned countless times in the wake of this kerfuffle, MySpace was the defacto social media company until one day they weren't. It's eas(ier) to introduce competition to Facebook over, say, Apple or Microsoft.
Finally, Facebook's product is, well, data. One could argue that it's a platform and data, but the former is a loss leader for the latter.
So for a number of reasons I find it unlikely that even were Apple to have a PR misstep like this that they'd face the same existential crisis.