A subtle change to the iPhone’s contact-sharing permissions

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall sentiment toward Apple’s new contacts permissions

  • Majority view: change is long-overdue, strongly pro-privacy, especially against apps that “slurp” entire address books and spam or data-mine contacts.
  • Many see it as closing an obvious “vulnerability” that enabled aggressive growth hacks by social apps.
  • Some celebrate that this may kill contact-harvesting business models; “if your startup depends on this, it shouldn’t exist.”

Impact on social and communication apps

  • Critics of the change argue it “pulls up the ladder” for new social apps that relied on rapid bootstrapping via contacts, making it harder to challenge incumbents.
  • Others counter that the old model caused huge societal and privacy harms; if we want different kinds of social networks, we need different rules.
  • Concern that 3rd-party email/messaging clients will now have worse UX (missing names, incomplete address books) while Apple’s own apps stay seamless.

Dark patterns, spam, and shadow profiles

  • Widespread agreement that many successful social apps grew by dark patterns: hijacking contact lists, sending mass invites, and building shadow profiles, including of non-users.
  • Several anecdotes about LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp, and others repeatedly nagging for contacts or microphone access, or coercing full sharing via degraded UX.

Granularity, fake data, and technical alternatives

  • Positive comparisons to existing granular photo permissions; desire for even finer controls:
    • Per-contact and per-field (e.g., share phone but not birthday).
    • Rate-limited contact lookup APIs and “circles”/groups to bulk-share subsets.
    • OS-level “scopes” that make apps believe they have full access while actually limiting data.
  • Some suggest fake or synthetic contacts as a defensive measure; others warn this could harm random real people if not carefully designed.

Platform power and Apple’s role

  • Debate over whether Apple is genuinely acting for privacy or entrenching its own apps by avoiding similar prompts for first-party services.
  • Some argue integrated suites (Contacts + Messages + Mail) naturally share data; others want strict sandboxing even between first-party apps.
  • General cynicism that Apple tolerated full-contact slurping for many years, only now tightening controls.