If you as an individual made an app that collected all contact information from people who installed it, you'd be in jail by now. Facebook (and others) have done that for years and are walking free (and rich, at that!).

This is the morals of the capitalist system: if you're already rich or powerful, you can do pretty much anything to the rest of us.

“Anacharsis, accordingly, on learning what Solon was about, laughed at him for thinking that he could check the injustice and rapacity of the citizens by written laws, which were just like spiders' webs; they would hold the weak and delicate who might be caught in their meshes, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.” - Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives [0].

[0]: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:20...