In privacy, we talk a lot about how to protect our own data, but what about our responsibility to protect the data of others? If you care about privacy rights, you must also care for the data of the people around you. Together, we must start building a culture of data privacy where everyone cares for the data of others.
There’s why I do not have or use Contacts on phone. There is no phone numbers in my phone. I have a couple copies of a text file with phone numbers save on USB’s and I think a BSD server. There’s no contact info that apps can scan to get other people’s emails or numbers.
It seems pretty extreme to me. Any app needs your consent to access your contacts and if you wanna hide them from Google to (if you’ve an Android smartphone), you could just download an open source contact app (like Fossify Contacts)
It’s a cat and mouse game for contact numbers. For example, Android’s Messages app can report all phone numbers of sent and received messages back to Google. You will never get millions of users to change which proprietary app they use for texting, so I do my part to have no numbers, no contacts, and never send a text message.
Fossyfy also has an open source SMS app, you can view all of them here.