[Feature] Save contact account IDs into phone's contacts

[kuchta]

Is there an existing request for feature?

• I have searched the existing issues

What feature would you like?

It would be great if Session could read and store my peers' account IDs in the phone's contact list, as they could then be easily managed/backed up/restored without using some opaque phone backup solution, and it would also allow various phone apps to initiate calls and messages....

Anything else?

No response

[keybreak]

This feature will kill your and all of your Session contacts privacy, as any other app on your phone would be able to read, correlate and uniquely identify you and all of your contacts. It takes just one clueless normie contact to use WhatsApp or something like that, on their phone - to completely burn you both, forever.

While not as convenient perhaps, it's best to store your contacts in safe place accessible only by you, for example KeePassDX database.

[x80486]

Indeed. This is one of the reasons I removed Signal.

[kuchta]

This feature will kill your and all of your Session contacts privacy, as any other app on your phone would be able to read, correlate and uniquely identify you and all of your contacts. It takes just one clueless normie contact to use WhatsApp or something like that, on their phone - to completely burn you both, forever.

That's not true @keybreak. Only apps that have access to contact list can read it and it's up to the user who he gives such a permission and in case of more secure and private OSes like GrapneneOS, users can even grant just a partial view of the contact list in case of cantact scopes and if you don't use more secure OS like GraphneneOS or CalyxOS, you phone/OS provider could steal even your private per app contact list from inside of any app anyway. And if you grant every app on you phone access to all all your global contacts, then you a a clueless normie that should just use WhatApp or Signal. Your phone, your choice 😉

[keybreak]

@kuchta
Well, it is still absolutely true.

You personally can have stellar opsec and not ever make mistakes (unlikely), and let's assume for the sake of argument, that all of your Session contacts are elite autistic hackers with stellar opsec as well (EXTREMELY unlikely 😆).
To completely burn and correlate you and your elite Session circle of contacts would take just one of your elite Session group's phone contacts clueless normies to leak their own phone contacts via sloppiness, built-in spyware of their phones or other apps...

And yeah, every 1337 h4xXx0r have a mom with WhatsApp or something...hell, even USA Pentagon have few random contacts to add into Signal these days, while having opsec of school children 🤣

Anyway, my point stands - we live in not ideal opsec world, and never will be.
So it's best to not introduce such feature into codebase and keep zero-trust attitude to behavior of yourself and your contacts.

[kuchta]

@keybreak It is true that one of my sloppy contacts could reveal the name under which he saved me, as well as other related information that could possibly identify me, but I don't think it's true that such information would somehow automatically proliferate to all of my contacts, except of course, those who would be equally sloppy. And why should I be so much concerned about my relationship with such relations being revealed, when they are typically those whose relation to me probably won't be that private anyway, such as my relatives, colleagues, or other quite public and thus fairly easily discoverable ones even by other means? Isn't such identity propagation (correlation) more a matter of centralized systems like WhatsApp or Signal than decentralized ones like Session?

You are right that we do not live in an ideal world when it comes to opsec and we never will. Most phone/OS providers do not open source code of their OSes and so they cannot be trusted. Thinking that you can build some totally private/secure solution on top of such a system is really just a pipe dream that will only give you a false sense of privacy/security which is even worse than knowing you have none...

[kuchta]

But anyway, I'm not even saying that using phone contacts list should be the default, just that it would be great if there's an option to do that, if user wants it that way...

[keybreak]

And why should I be so much concerned about my relationship with such relations being revealed

Good question - in fact, it should be THE concern in modern world actually.

1. Facebook / Google has all means to effortlessly target anybody through contacts (there's only one unique phone number for each user that has exactly the same contacts as yourself, it's a very strong fingerprinting source) and tie it to your unique id in those big tech corps, along with stuff like your real-time position through towers triangulation, in fact they already do that for ads and feds...

2. If they can obtain your Session id and correlate it with their unique id - you're burned, your Session becomes basically tied to your real unique identity, about as reliable as government id for all intents and purposes.

3. If Big Tech has it - government / feds have it. As well as all kinds of criminals by proxy of 3rd party data trade, targeted ads and leaks.

That's why it's absolutely terrible idea, even doing it optionally, because it's basically a privacy killswitch.

[kuchta]

1. How can Big Tech target you through session ID? They can track you online by cookies and fingerprinting and if let's say you pay on some site, than they can even get to know your real indentiy. Nothing to do with session id.

2. You are not burned if they know your session id. It's the point of private decentralized messeging to construct the protocal in such a way that no one party can track your communication.

3. You still conflate online tracking with messaging

You should probably stop for second and think about what you are saying, I mean, how it ACTUALLY works from a technical perspective, because you seem full of unfounded privacy BS and marketing...

[kuchta]

Anyway, I think better (more private) solution would be if we can generate multiple (e.g. per contact or group of contacts) session id, something like invite id instead of having just one account id. Something like crypto wallets usually do to generate hierarchical per address key pairs from one master key pair.