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1. sprink+(OP)[view] [source] 2025-07-26 14:38:46
My biggest peeve with the forced push towards apps is that you're often forced to fork over permissions to access valuable data that they couldn't otherwise gleam glean from a browser. Chief amongst this is the Contacts permission.

If you are one to carefully curate your contacts book to contain addresses, emails, birthdays for your own convenience and productivity, you have now provided a veritable goldmine of information for these companies to plunder, and betray the confidence of your acquaintances. I really despise this, and I've been looking for a solution but none thus far have seemed satisfactory.

I know of apps (at least on Android) like Bouncer and alternatives from F-Droid that can temporarily grant access to certain permissions like Location for a few minutes at a time, while giving the apps the illusion of full access.

However, save for using a Private Space or different user profile (both similarly require provisioning basically an extra instance of Google Play and everything) I haven't yet found a way to feed some sort of dummy contacts book to these greedy apps. If anyone knows of such a solution that is more convenient than setting up a new profile then please enlighten us.

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