>One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do.
>As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.
Fortunately this is changing with iOS 18 with "limited contacts" sharing.
https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/image.p...
The interface also seems specifically designed to push people to allow only a subset of contacts, rather than blindly clicking "allow all".
The far bigger issue is the contact info you share with online retailers. Scraping contact info through apps is very visible, drawing flak from the media and consumers. Most of the time all you get is a name (could be a nickname), and maybe some combination of phone/email/address, depending on how diligent the person in filling out all the fields. On the other hand placing any sort of order online requires you to provide your full name, address, phone number, and email address. You can also be reasonably certain that they're all accurate, because they're plausibly required for delivery/billing purposes. Such data can also be surreptitiously fed to data brokers behind the scenes, without an obvious "tiktok would like access to your contacts" modal.
