Hide your address books!  Your phone's contact database may be at risk.  The worst part about it is that it's not even at risk due to viruses, but due to legitimate application developers who are using your smart phone's address book for their own person benefit and gain.

Yes, that's right, the applications you have on your phone may be intentionally uploading your entire contact database without telling you to their servers.  Path, a new social application that's gaining a lot of attention, was recently exposed for uploading it's users' address books without their consent.  

VentureBeat, a popular tech blog, did an extensive blog post on the very issue explaining how iPhone applications pretty much have full rein in taking your data and uploading it to their servers.  On top of it all, that data might not even be transferred securely, exposing your address book contents to more than just the developer of the application.

The severity of the problem became more apparent when a potential customer told me a story about how he keeps over 1,000 current and potential customer contacts on his phone because of the convenience. Could you imagine having all of your contact data copied, without your consent just because you wanted to use a cool new application?

Unfortunately, when it comes to smart phones, practicing proper security standards usually isn't done so smartly.  There is certainly a trade-off between convenience and security, but it doesn't have to be that way.

If you have a smart phone, chances are you have a pretty good data plan with full access to the web.  In that case, it doesn't make a lot of sense to keep your contacts on your phone and synchronize them between your other devices.  Instead, you could have all of your contacts housed on your website.  

By having your contacts housed on your website, you could have convenient access to all of your customer contact data from a central location which you can retrieve from any of your Internet connected devices via the web browser.  When done properly, access to this data can be secured much more easily than securing data that's directly stored on your mobile device.

Lastly, as part of a complete website strategy, having your contact information in a central and web-friendly database can open up other possibilities such as allowing customers to manage their own data to make updates, use it for demographically targeted email campaigns, and providing not just one person within your organization to the data, but enabling an entire sales staff convenient access to that data for use in the field.