• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, January 11, 2017

Twitter, Yelp, Path and five other app developers have agreed to resolve a class-action complaint alleging that they wrongly uploaded iPhone users' address books, according to recent court papers.

Counsel for the iPhone users and tech companies said in a written "notice of settlement," publicly filed late last week with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, that they will reveal the details of the agreement by late April.

If accepted by U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar, the settlement will resolve a privacy dispute stemming from 2012 revelations about surreptitious address-book uploads. Initially, tech experts accused mobile social networks Path and Hipster (later acquired and shut down by AOL) of accessing and storing users' address books without their knowledge.

Soon after the initial reports, security researchers accused other developers -- including Foodspotting, Foursquare Labs, Gowalla, Instagram, Kik Interactive, Twitter and Yelp -- of uploading users' address books. Unlike Path, those other developers reportedly asked people for permission to access their address books, in order to help them connect with friends who also used the service. But Foodspotting, Yelp, Twitter and the other developers allegedly didn't specify that they would keep the data in their servers.

iPhone user Marc Opperman, and other consumers, sued Apple and more than a dozen developers over the allegations. The consumers argued that address-book uploads amount to "intrusion upon seclusion," which is actionable in California. (Some of the developers that were originally sued -- including Electronic Arts -- previously agreed to settle the litigations.)

The allegations against also Path resulted in charges by the Federal Trade Commission, which the company settled by agreeing to create a comprehensive privacy policy.

Tigar ruled against Yelp on a key issue last year, when he rejected the company's argument that the consumers shouldn't be able to proceed because they agreed to allow the company to access their contacts.

The consumers contended that they only allowed Yelp to "access" or "look at" their contacts, and not to "upload" the data. Tigar ruled that the consumers raised enough questions about the scope of their consent to warrant a trial.