No one was complaining about having to ask the user for permission to access an address book. People were complaining about silly, arbitrary rules, like banning dictionary apps for "not being family friendly" or walling off entire areas of computer science from third-party developers because of some obscure pissing match between Steve and Adobe.

It's disingenuous at best to compare user privacy protection with the massive list of rules enforced by Apple for reasons that never had anything to do with protecting users.