The Getcontact app shines with your personal data, even if you’ve never used it

• We install the application, register, log in using the required phone number, but we do not issue any access: neither to the call logs, nor to messages, and even less to our contacts – the Getcontact functionality will be available anyway

• In chapter Other → Show Profile at this stage, it is possible to view your tags, as well as search for tags of other people – after following this instruction, the service will become unavailable to us. The application, by the way, has a limit of six free number searches per month; more – for money (from 590 ₽ per month)

• We go to official site applications, we find in the basement in the section Help paragraph Manage Your Privacy Profile

• Log in to the site in a convenient way for you

• In chapter Visibility settings disable Search visibility. For fun, you can read why you shouldn’t do it.

• We confirm the seriousness of our intentions and learn that the changes may take up to three hours to take effect and that if you later decide to use the service again, your tags will again become visible to everyone

• After confirmation, you will be automatically logged out both on the site and in the application, which can be safely deleted

  Now, when you call, Getcontact users will see only the digits of your phone number (if you are not recorded in it, of course), and when they try to search for your number in the application, the following message will appear:

Hearth burns

Personally, I consider it abnormal when my personal data (first and last name at least) freely stick out to anyone. Of course, you may object that all our data has long been leaked to the network either by accident or by design; but these leaks are illegal and out of my area of ​​responsibility. In an ideal world, this shouldn’t be the case.

And then it turns out that such applications do not legally violate anything, and what is happening is considered normal, at least in the Russian Federation (in some countries the application is banned). After all, it turns out that it’s not you who are leaking your data under the slogan “Your own evil Pinocchio,” but other people who wrote you into their phone, mindlessly installed dubious applications into it and gave them all the requested rights. It is impossible to vouch for the reliability of all your subscribers – it may not even occur to them that they are leaking someone’s personal information in this way.

And the most annoying thing is that it is not enough just to pass by these stupid things in order not to feel their influence on yourself. I have to understand them, register and configure services, which I would not even have thought to use otherwise.

Take care of your personal data (and others too). And if you know of other similar smelly apps, feel free to share information about them in the comments.