Eleven plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit in Texas district court against 18 firms whose mobile phone apps "surreptitiously harvest, upload and illegally steal the owner's address book data without the owner's knowledge or consent," the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit also claims that the uploads “have, quite literally, turned the address book owners’ wireless mobile devices into mobile radio beacons broadcasting and publicly exposing the unsuspecting device owner’s address book data to the world,” PC Mag reports.