Address Book has always been a C API, not an Objective-C API, for legacy reasons. I suspect that had a lot to do with it.

I think the reason for that is that people generally take an optimistic view of the world, e.g. "good things will usually happen." When smart phones came out your data was easily available. How many people at that time do you think shrugged it off with the excuse: "well, yeah, but I'm not doing anything wrong/who would care what I'm doing?"

Now that people finally understand that this practice is very widespread and considered "normal" among a non-trivial amount of people in the technology space people naturally have become more protective of their information.