Yesterday Tapulous, makers of Tap Tap Revenge and Twinkle, released another great application called Friend Book, but the app wasn’t performing great things for its users.

“Handshake is sending my contact info to strangers! A random person I’ve never met before got my contact information when handshaking. They emailed and told me.”

Tapulous Support 

What is handshaking and what is Friend Book? The app in general is a way to manage contacts and in some ways works better than the built-in contacts app. Also with this app you can share contacts with someone who is in the same area as you and has an iPhone or iPod Touch of course. The information is pushed to a cloud and then given to that person, but it appears that others are also receiving the information as well.

If you read on in the forum others have claimed to receive random contact information and some have even had their information sent to random people. Some people have even been contacted by these strangers who received their information. This is a scary thought that someone random person out there has your email, phone number, and/or even other personal data of yours.

Tapulous has removed the application from the App Store and has not said a word about this, or even announced that the app went live in the first place. For all you iPhone and iPod Touch users out there with Friend Book installed it’s best to uninstall it until it’s released again, unless you want your data pushed to random people.

Update: Tapulous has released the following statement from its blog.

“I am sorry to report that the release of Friend Book will be delayed by at least a week or two.

Yesterday, the app was briefly made available on the AppStore. However, after receiving several reports of the Handshake feature malfunctioning, we decided to remove the app from the AppStore until we can be certain that the app is behaving correctly and that users’ privacy will be fully guarded.

Meanwhile, keep on tapping and twinkling!“

Update #2: The CEO of Tapulous has released a statement on this matter.

Comments welcome.