Your Phone Contacts AREN'T Private

The humble Contact List in our phone is a goldmine of data. Each contact is filled with the personal information like names, numbers, email addresses, home addresses, birthdays, work details and social media information. It’s the kind of information that data brokers salivate over because it allows unprecedented insight into consumer behavior, political leanings, and even potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited. The worst thing is, it's not even your information that's being taken -- When we don't protect our contacts list, it's the information that OTHERS have entrusted to us that we're sharing.

In this video I talk about Contact Lists, why you might not want to store them in your phone or share them with other apps on your device, and finally I’ll talk about more private ways to store them.

00:00 Your Phone Compromises Your Contacts
00:28 Overview
00:39 Why Contacts Lists Are Important
01:51 Who Sees Our Contact List
05:37 Private Ways To Store Contacts
06:23 Reviewing App Permissions
06:57 Third Party Contact Apps
07:53 Encrypted Contact Storage
08:43 Graphene: The Ultimate Solution
09:57 It’s Time to Take Back Control!

By disabling automatic cloud syncing, regularly reviewing and managing our apps’ contact permissions, and using privacy-focused apps and services, we can reduce the indiscriminate harvesting of our social graph. Our contacts deserve to be treated with the utmost care and respect.

NOTE: In our video, we mention Simple Contacts Pro, but we have since learned that it has been acquired by ZipoApps, a company known for adding ads and tracking to apps. One of the developers forked the project, and the fork, “Fossify,” is an alternative that you can consider instead.
https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Contacts

Brought to you by NBTV team members: Lee Rennie, Cube Boy, Kieran Mesquita, Reuben Yap, Sam Ettaro, Will Sandoval and Naomi Brockwell

Watch all of the tutorials in our Phone Privacy Playlist HERE:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt3zZ-N423gXV-0pdxnRn-nw0WzVKh4NY

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Beware of scammers, I will never give you a phone number or reach out to you with investment advice. I do not give investment advice.

Watch this on YouTube (but why would you want to??)
https://youtu.be/FloGxOlMSyI