Apps want to access contacts and it’s all or nothing right now. But Contacts also is quite integrated and is better if you fill in more details such as addresses and birthdates.
So an app requesting access gets everything if you grant it.
For Apple‘s pro-privacy stance, this oversight is quite painful.
I'm not saying the end-user shouldn't be able to ignore this, but as part of these controls that would be great. I don't need or want a shadow-profile on Clubhouse or anything else.
A standard pattern for social apps is to ask for access to your contacts to see if anyone you know is on their app. This is important to creating a healthy and diverse ecosystem of social software, because these apps are really up against the natural network effects of existing offerings.
Contact matching is the best shot app creators have at bootstrapping new social offerings, but right now the experience sucks. Just to see if you like a new social app you have to either a) give up lots of private data in perpetuity to an entity you don't know, or b) have a subpar experience of manually finding people.
One solution may be for Apple to offer an API that helps social apps match users. Apple acts as the escrow system to match contacts so that the apps never have access to private contact data, and the apps just get notice when there's a new contact match to offer the user.
On the user side, the user has a simple privacy setting that says 'find matches once' or 'always look for new matches when app is open'. Users may also toggle whether they wish to be discoverable by others.
In a world with this feature, we get to try new social apps without concern, and apps only have access to an anonymized user ID for our contacts that are also using the app.
Small indie developers are the majority of developers in Apple’s ecosystem. If they are to be screwed over as well (for example, with the upcoming sideloading feature unlocking piracy for everyone), it doesn’t seem fantastic.
Sometimes bending to the user is to the detriment of developers who create the ecosystem your users appreciate in the first place.
iOS is the singular OS in the world where the user's freedom is curtailed in such a heavy handed manner.
No subscriptions, no servers required to use. It is very rare now. Apple made this ecosystem it possible by being an intermediary between you and your customers, ensuring they do not run cracked versions of your work to save money and rip you off. It would suck to see it go.
Note who lobbied for this law. Not coincidentally, not the companies that actually did the above (selling software to own), just big corps with competing platforms.
You know this and I know this.
> iOS is the singular OS in the world where the user's freedom is curtailed in such a heavy handed manner.
Pointed out that isn't the case across the planet, moved goalposts to only 5 OSes, ignoring the supposed rest of the world
> There are three dominant desktop and two mobile operating systems...
Apparently the world is too big to make a point.
Additionally, it would be great to not share metadata about contacts (ie, don't share that I have this person listed as my sister).
It's quite difficult to have a privacy preserving API system that's on-device because people could pre-compute a rainbow table (phone numbers are only 10-ish digits long). If the API is provided by Apple using their servers, this might work.
iOS 9.0+. The blunder is Apple not deprecating CNContactStore, but then many apps really only work if they get your full contacts list (e.g. knowing when a friend joins Snapchat)
Too bad for those apps. They should be able to work whether I have 1000 contacts, 0 contacts, or any number in between.
If they want to have a cool feature like alerting me when a friend joins, they are more than welcome to persuade me to provide my full contacts list so I get the most out of a feature.
Offering a privacy-preserving alternative to that would be a huge iOS feature. It seems like Apple even already has most of the necessary pieces for that in place (e.g. the contacts app already knows whether my contacts have FaceTime enabled, Messages knows who has iMessage etc.)
- Access to all contacts
- Access to selected contacts
Additionally, for any of the two options above:
- Access to all details
- Access to selected details (e.g. phone, email)
Lastly:
- Access to all labels
- Access to selected labels (e.g. home, work)
So, finally, all Germans will be able to sleep at night knowing that they gave WhatsApp only permission to access their friends’ non-work phone numbers and nothing else.
LOL
If I book an event let an app save it and read it’s own data, but not every event ever.