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Comment by nicolas_t | Hacker News Reader

My problem with whatsapp is that there's no way to use it without giving access to my entire contact list to the app. And that's out of the question for me.

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On iOS you can actually deny access when the OS prompt comes up and WhatsApp will still work. You just have to start conversations using a phone number instead of a name/contact. I use it this way, and it is a little inconvenient but I feel better not uploading my phone book.

While this is noble of you, I guess 99% of your (and mine) contacts won't do the same. So you're protecting your friends, while your own number is still shared with Facebook.

This is what annoys me the most. I can't control what people put in their address book about me (physical address, email, photo, phone number, maybe even more infos) and who they share my info with.

There's XPrivacy out there, which proxies apps' requests for various information like contacts or location. But you need a rooted Android phone to use it.

as a workaround, on an iPhone you could move your 'sensitive' contacts to another app, like "Contactshield".

then you can safely share your 'normal' contacts with Whatsapp.

I thought with Android Marshmallow and iOS you can deny access to contacts. I guess if you're not on Marshmallow or higher, you're not going to get this benefit

A lot of apps these days will not run unless they get access to the data they request. What I would like to see is android having the ability to give empty sets of information if so chosen instead of denying access, or to compartmentalize applications access to shared resources more.

You can't get what's app to do anything if you don't grant it access to your contacts. I ended up creating a new user profile on my phone based on a new Gmail account just to run what's app...

some austrian lawyer recently argued that this is even illegal in the EU. not necessary for whatsapp but for the user who is stupid enough to willingly upload data that does not belong to him.

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