If you are a doctor, or a politician, or someone in a position of responsibility in a charity, or you are using your personal phone to contact work colleagues or customers, then there are probably contacts on your phone which you hold in trust, but does the fact you hold their information give you the right to give it, without their knowledge or consent, to a third party?
Almost every ‘free’ social media app is financed by selling personal information to advertisers, and when you grant app access to your contacts the owning corporation has access to as much as you know – at the very least phone numbers, but potentially home and work addresses, dates of birth etc. In fact the corporation probably knows a lot more about them than you do, as it knows who else’s contact lists they appear on.
If your contacts include vulnerable people, and, for example they might to more susceptible to poor buying decisions, say people with poor self esteem responding more readily to advertisements for ‘quick fix’ weight loss products.
Note that this does not happen the way a person would think about it, e.g. this person runs a support group, lets target them, but buy an algorithm which takes large amounts of data, profiles people in a more general way, creating groups of people more likely to respond to particular types of message.
The message might not be ‘buy something’ – it could equally well be ‘vote for something’ or ‘protest about (immigration,violence against women, corrupt government,damage to the environment, …)’
If you are an estate agent your contacts list probably contain more people who are about to buy new furniture than if you are, say a farmer.
What are the risks?
Exchanging your personal data for some benefit from a marketeer has a long tradition – and can be mutually beneficial. This can avoid you being bombarded with information on unwanted products, and can also allow a retailer to offer targeted discounts or coupons.
The big datasets of customer information can lead to companies knowing more than they may expect, for example a supermarket knowing a teenage girl was pregnant before her parents did.
There is, I believe, a difference between trading your privacy for some benefit, compared to the personal information of a third party who will not benefit from the arrangement.
What are the options?
Instant messaging is a very useful facility, particularly with the ability to keep in touch with friends or family, or local groups, so is it possible to use Instant Messaging, while not sharing information about other people?
Use a second phone
If a company entrusts it’s employees with customer data, the company should consider the risks and benefits of providing them with a ‘work’ phone and insisting that work and personal contacts must be kept separate. Despite the inconvenience of staff having to carry a ‘work’ and a ‘personal’ phone there is a risk that the companies data will be leaked, via personal use of a proprietary IM app. There is also a risk to the employees privacy (and that of their contacts), if the company backups up contacts from phones to its own systems.
I use an old Android phone, which I only use for WhatsApp, which I do use, reluctantly, as there are people I want to keep in touch with who use it – largely because of the network effect where they have contacts who use it – and so on. As this phone only has contact information for people who are already WhatApp users, it is not giving Meta group any information they do not already hold. This phone also has a XMPP instant messenger app on it – see below – which allows me to forward important messages.
Use an iPhone with iOS18 or over
With iOS 18 it is now possible to allow an app to only have access to a limited subset of your contacts. This is a big improvement over previous versions which, like Android (up to Android 15) only allow, or deny app access to All your contacts – and WhatsApp will not run without Contacts permission.
Use an Internet Standard XMPP Instant Messenger chat app
Unlike WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Viber, Facebook Messenger or other proprietary Instant Messengers there are a wide range of Apps which will talk to each other over XMPP. It is fairly easy to find one (such as Conversations or Snikket) which do not require access to your contacts information.
These can be installed on the same device as a proprietary Instant Messenger, and allow you to communicate with other XMPP users. If you are in an area where the privacy of end users is important then consider making XMPP accounts available to those users who do not have one. With Snikket hosting this has become much easier, as you can rent a simple hosted service from them to try it, with the potential to run your own system if this becomes more cost effective.
If you represent a small UK charity who wishes to try hosted Snikket, and you can receive donations via the Charities Aid Foundation, please contact me to discuss funding a pilot. I can be contacted by email tojohn+snikketoffer@paladyn.org, or by posting a comment on this article. Comments are moderated, and I will discuss with you before making the comment public (or not if you prefer)
Larger organisations will probably want to integrate XMPP chat with the other systems they use, which can be done – the systems are very flexible, but are still welcome to contact me as above to set up a pilot.