Apple has made an important change to how contacts are shared with apps. With the arrival of iOS 18, users can now select individual contacts to share with an app rather than the entire address book. The change was first reported in-depth by The New York Times. You can still share your whole address book with an app, but you probably should avoid that.
According to the iOS 18 support page: “Decide which contacts to share with an app, rather than giving it access to all your contacts. Or give the app access only to those you message and call most.”
The change puts user privacy first. Consider this: There are important contacts in the address book of a journalist… these can be their sources. Journalists would prefer not to share these contacts with any app.
The move highlights the power of gatekeepers like Apple. A minor change can have a tremendous effect on the tech industry. It also shows how users want to put privacy first while many tech companies want to crack that barrier. There are trade-offs when one shares the entire contact address book.
For years, the way contact sharing has worked on iOS devices is that an app can trigger a message called a “data access prompt”, asking for access to a user’s contacts. If the user agrees, the app developer gets a list of all the contacts in that user’s address book, along with other information stored in the user’s contact cards, such as phone numbers and email addresses. This information can be used by app developers to come up with a user’s social graph and it will help suggest what other accounts users can follow.
For Apple, the idea is simple: Users shouldn’t be forced to share all the information with any app. Many users have thousands of contacts on their iPhones, therapists, for example. Why would anybody want an app to know if the user is visiting a therapist? For years, iOS has allowed users to give apps selective access to photos. The same principle applies to contacts. Apple has always put users first because the iPhone has become a security vault on the move.
According to NYT, the iOS 18 changes wouldn’t hurt app developers, rather developers might see an uptick in contact sharing, if users who previously would have declined to share any contacts can just share the ones they want.
Before the change, apps could request access to your contacts and this helped social media apps where they could search your contacts for the email addresses of existing members. You may argue that we have already shared our address books with almost every social media network. True. But Facebook, Instagram or TikTok are not forever and there will come a new service to surpass them all. When that happens, I will allow selective access to friends so that they are invited.
