It would be ridiculous to make something like that illegal. Contact information shared with an individual DOES give that individual the freedom to use the information how they'd like. Hopefully whoever shared their contact information in the first place is okay with their information being stored with Apple or Google since that is the default way many people back up their contacts. If the contact sharer is not okay with it the onus is on them to vet who it is they're sharing their information with.
So you don't store numbers of any of your contacts? You must have some insane memory ... but then again ... maybe memorizing random people's data should also be illegal... I mean did the people who told you those details give you permission to memorize it? I think not. And when you enter those memorized details into your browser or phone ... who gave you permission to do that?! Blatant GDPR violations.
If only there was some way to store contacts without uploading them..
Has it really come to this? If you open your phone now you usually have two offline options: to store contacts on the SIM card and to store them on the phone.
If you want backups and comfort without betraying your contacts you run your own nextcloud instance and store them automatically on there.
That's why my dream contact platform would feature client side encryption. We should have a bitwarden/lastpass/1password for contacts, that synchronizes it across my services and devices, with a solid API + permission scheme to share with other apps.
I currently have at least 6 places where my contacts are stored (should I say scattered). I have no way to search them all, tag them all, archive the ones I seldom need, have versioning of the various data, etc.
Besides, contacts are a very broad topic.
I have contacts for friend and families, I have girls I'm flirting with, I have clients, I have administration offices, hair cutters, providers, restaurants... For some of them I want a way to contact them, some of them the location, some I don't want to appear in the main listing, some I want to explicitly hide from people peeking at my phones, some I want to easily share or even synchronize with others.
And then there is the way things are labelled. When going networking, I will collect many contacts I want to isolate. I want to be able to search them from a "known from" fields, or a "industry" tag. I want to make groups to mass communicate: I organize parties and sport events, and the best way to get people on board is still direct texting, and optional calling: fb events don't cut it.
It's one of those simple topics that aren't solve.
There is still no simple way to just send files from any computer to another. Try telling your mum to send you this videos from their iPhone to your laptop now that the wifi is down. Or share 3Go of photos with this group of 20 persons you just met on a trip.
There is still no simple way to make check lists (not to do list, mind you, there are plenty of those).
Having a personal archive of documents and notes sucks. Best effort used to be Evernote and MS one note. Proprietary plateform and standards, lock ins and of course they access your stuff.
Noting stuff on the way is hacking. I use telegram self-messaging for that because it let me quickly write, film, record stuff and queue them in a thread that sync accross my devices.
And contacts are still a mess. Once in a while, you receive the "I changed my phone/lost my contacts/new email/made a mistake" text asking "who is this ?". I still note metadata in the "name" field of contact to remember where I know the person from, or the name of their children to avoid being awkward when meeting them again.
Still we have an amazing free map of the entire world, more quality video content we can ever consume and encyclopedic knowledge of my entire field of expertise at my fingertip.
"Still we have an amazing free map of the entire world, more quality video content we can ever consume and encyclopedic knowledge of my entire field of expertise at my fingertip.
The way computer evolved is weird. "
To some extent, that's understandable. Storing and accessing static objective information that is the same for every user, that's easy, in a way it's just a matter of bandwidth and storage space.
Personal information and personal workflows, that is a different matter entirely.
Well, the GDPR doesn't apply to "a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity", so they can upload them, assuming they're personal contacts.
For contacts of clients and such, probably yes, since whatever conditions for allowing their processing in Gmail probably also apply to Skype (and vice-versa). But it might not if for some reason the other service offers less security or control over that data.
That makes sense from the uploader side. But can the service store and use data about me because you uploaded it? In this case I have only added my data to Gmail, and never allowed Skype to have it and have not accepted the terms from Skype.
Maybe. It can probably use this to help the user who uploaded it do something, since for that purpose it's evidently suitable - if I upload the claim that rypskar has the nickname "Dog boy", their phone number is +1-555-555-1234 but they live in New Zealand, then providing that information back to me seems pretty harmless even if it is bogus.
But if they take this data and then try to do something else with it, whether that's contact rypskar or give the data about rypskar to somebody else - that's going to run into lots of GDPR problems around correctness (the data processor is obliged to take reasonable steps to ensure the data is accurate and fix problems on request) and as you identified with permissions (did rypskar authorise this? How do we know? Who even is rypskar?)
> I wanted to see who I knew when LinkedIn first came out.
I'm curious, why? I sign up to different services (reluctantly) because I want to communicate with people I can't yet. Occasionally I might have some contacts on two networks, if there's some specific feature I want to use, but it's rare.
Sure, I might want that with a few coworkers, but not with my brother, aunt, friend's boyfriend or mother, tenant who rents my house, the shop who delivers butane, etc. Essentially 95% of my contacts are not relevant to a specific network, and dumping them indiscriminately seems not just bad form, but time wasting for me and them as well.
> Are you sure you don't have business contacts who are also in your email address book?
There is no such thing as "just not connect with them". Once it gets an address, LI will hound you and them, trying to convince them to signup and connect (they even lost a lawsuit over this), and then they'll leak the contacts for every other criminal to abuse them.
Yeah, I'll manually add a few people to avoid imposing that on myself and others.
True. These days we get all these kind of recommendations. We are not aware but we are granting access to our resources from one service to other services.
I get it – people feel like it is their contacts because they collected them, but they are not. This should be illegal.