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Comment by zerof1l | Hacker News Reader

I have WhatsApp and you can deny access to your phonebook. Everything works just fine

How are you able to send whatsapps to people you don't have a prior conversation with ?

I am doing the same boat...and was working fine until i lost & replaced my old phone. All conversations were lost, and this makes it challenging to use whatsapp for any non-group conversations (since I can't start any).

You can start a conversation with any WhatsApp number by opening the url wa.me/number. The number must include the country prefix.

There are also some apps and webpages that helps with this process (Disclaimer: I'm the author of one of them for Android [0])

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy...

Others can still allow access to their phone book and the information stored in them about you will be transmitted and saved at Facebook, won't it? Is there a way to disable that?

> Is there a way to disable that?

No.

Exactly this. I recently started a twitter for my academic career. Didn't share my contacts or anything (I only follow academic twitter too). I get tons of suggestions of people I know and several have followed me. The information is from their contact list because twitter knows my number and connected us. There's a clear benefit to this, but there's also privacy concerns too. The lack of control over this is what is concerning.

You need an account to ask FB to delete your data.

Last time I tried (a year ago or so) I couldn't add new people to chat to. They had to contact me first.

As I've seen on WhatsApp on every smartphone I've had: when you download WhatsApp and tap the "New chat" icon in the upper right corner, the app SHOWS YOU a list of everyone from your phone's contact list who has a WhatsApp account. They also show the list when you click "Chat" at the bottom and then "New Group."

Without Contact access in iOS, WhatsApp blocks you from starting a group chat, but allows individual chats.

You can't start a group chat, only individual chats.

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