Bluesky launches privacy-focused ‘Find Friends’ feature without unwanted invitation

Bluesky, the social network that competes with X and Threads, is introducing a friend finder feature that it claims respects user privacy, the company announced Wednesday. To work, the app matches you with friends from contacts saved in your phone’s address book — but only if both people opt in.

“Importing contacts has long been the most effective way to find people you know on a social app, but it has also been poorly implemented or abused by platforms,” the company explained in its statement. advertisement. “Even with encryption, phone numbers were leaked, brute force, sold to spammers, or used by platforms for questionable purposes. We weren’t willing to accept these risks, so we developed a fundamentally safer approach to protecting your data.”

Additionally, social media apps in the past often used contact matching as a lead generation tool. That is, if the app detects that you have friends who are not on its service, it will recommend you to “add them.” This will then send the friend an invitation via text message. Typically, those on the receiving end will not appreciate this unwanted application.

due to bad luck, road He has long He was effectiveThis helped the apps spread, as at least some invited users downloaded the app and tried it out of curiosity. But despite the initial buzz this method can create, that it Not a foolproof method To secure long-term users. (Although a social app might help finds that exitwhen the market is open for mergers and acquisitions!)

Bluesky states that it will not send automatic invitations to your contacts, even if you choose to upload your address book to its service.

Instead, it allows users to send an invitation to a friend directly – but this is an intentional manual action that the user must take. (Since these are personal messages from a friend, you cannot opt ​​out of receiving invitations.)

To use the friend finder feature, you first have to verify your phone number by entering the six-digit code sent to you via SMS before loading your contacts. The company notes that this prevents bad actors from downloading random numbers in order to obtain information about Bluesky users.

Early adopters should note that matching contacts may take some time, but more people will start showing up on this screen as more Bluesky users upload their contacts to match. You will only be matched with friends if you and your friend have each other in your address book.

If you’d rather not be found by people you know from work or from your real life, you can simply choose not to use this feature.

Bluesky says it stores uploaded contact information in hashed pairs, where your number is combined with each contact’s number. The company claims this makes it difficult to reverse engineer the data. Data encryption is tied to a hardware key that is stored separately from the Bluesky database as well. If you later want to remove your data from Bluesky, you can delete your uploaded contacts and unsubscribe. Details about the technology have already been provided Available to the security community as an RFCin order to get feedback before launch.

The feature is now rolling out to Bluesky users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK and US.