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December 18, 2014

Smoke Signals, Morse Code or … ?

It seemed like a straightforward question. If you use Apple’s Contacts.app to store your contacts, you’ve surely noticed this behaviour: some of your contacts auto-magically sprout clickable links for Facetime video/audio chats, with no intervention on your part. I was curious enough to submit a query about it, via Apple’s Support Site:

Contacts.app seems to know whether each of my contacts has registered their email for FaceTime, even if I have NEVER tried to facetime with them (or call their cell-phone or …). How does it do this? Are all of the email addresses in my addressbook automatically uploaded to Apple’s servers? If so, how do I turn this off, as it seems to be a MASSIVE invasion of my privacy.

That was a month and a half ago (2014/11/02). Today, I received a response:

Posted by distler at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Followups (14)