Bluesky claims new contact import feature is ‘privacy first’

Bluesky finally lets you find people you already know, which is one of the many popular features on other social media platforms, e.g Notifications and Bookmarkswhich was noticeably absent in the growing emergent. Unlike competitors, it Claims It doesn’t sacrifice privacy to do so.

The Friend Finder feature is “privacy-first by design,” unlike what Ploskey says are processes that are “poorly implemented or abused” elsewhere. You can verify your phone number, upload your contacts, and get in touch if — and only if — someone in your contact book chooses to do the same.

Plosky says there are a few things that make his approach different:

It only works if both people participate. You will only be matched with someone if you both have each other in your contacts and have opted in to find friends. If you never use this feature, you will never be able to be found through it. Your coworker can’t use it to find you unless you download their number from your contacts.

You have to verify your number first. Before any matching can occur, you must verify that you own your phone number. This prevents bad actors from loading random numbers to look up information about people on Bluesky.

Your contact data is protected even if something goes wrong. We store phone numbers as hash pairs – your number combined with each contact’s number – which makes reverse engineering the data significantly harder. This encryption is also linked to a hardware security key stored separately from our database.

You can remove your data at any time. Did you change your mind? You can delete uploaded contacts and unsubscribe completely.

Find Friends is initially limited to mobile app users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Access it via Going Go to Settings in the mobile application and choose “Search for friends from contacts”. You can also invite friends to join Bluesky, although the text messages will come from you, not the app.

Finally, don’t worry if it seems like you have no friends:

It may take a while for matches to appear if you’re one of the first to use this feature. As more people sign up, you’ll start seeing more connections.