Hi,
I know it's against Google's philosophy but I'd prefer not to give up my privacy, e. g. my contacts, in exchange for free software. Almost every app from Playstore wants to access (and exploit) my contacts.
How can I use two contact books, one containing dummy entries (or may be the public phonebook of my city or university) plus a private one for my real contacts? Apps with contacts-read permission would only see my 'public' contacts while my dialer and messaging apps would have access to my secrets.
Is there an app for this?
TIA,
toshibashi
I have been looking for the same thing!
Related
Greetings
I have had it just about enough of this Facebook virus and the contact importing in Android in general. What is the point of importing something if we have absolutely no control over deleting any of it?
The basic question is: How can I delete -some- contacts out of the imported Facebook contacts? Not how to delete all of them, not how to only show the ones with phone numbers, not how to merge them with other contacts.
Furthermore, please don't just answer "You can't.". At least not without explaining why exactly it is not humanly possible.
I have a rooted (xperia mini pro) phone, and I would like to reasearch just where and how are these uneditable contacts stored, and how to strike down on them with great vengeance and furious anger.
__________
What I suspect happens is, for instance, Skype downloads its own contacts and stores them for itself (because it needs them), and then Andorid reads these contacts and just displays them in the phonebook. So if we would want extra filtering functionality for skype contacts in the phonebook, we'd have to write our own phonebook app.
However, in Facebook's case, it does not need those stored contacts for anything other than this syncing functionality. Which means, what we could do is, access wherever this offline fb contact database is, and manually delete what we don't want to have. Right? then, when the phonebook app reads the fb contacts, it will just find the ones we care about.
Is that right?
+1 for any educated answers.
I'm trying to figure out how I can reliably merge all the duplicate contacts I have to a single contact on the phone. What I'm trying to achieve is to be able to have:
1) 1 Single contact per person (not "linked" or "joined" but one single contact)
2) combine replace the older pictures with newer ones
3) Pull Facebook ID for use with Contacts-sync (so I can get 720x720 contact pictures instead of whatever the facebook app pulls)
Example: If i have 4 Joe Smith contacts (1 on the phone, one from facebook [i know, it's not editable], one from google, and one from contacts sync), I want to be able merge them all so that there is only 1 Joe Smith contact that has all the information from all 4 contacts so I can unsync facebook and google out of it.
I want to be able to pull the facebook ID number for the contacts so it can resync the picture as needed as well as reduce the clutter that I have.
Why? Facebook's current concept in syncing "existing contacts" seem to be the same thing as sync ALL contacts. It downloads ALL my friends info from Facebook and puts it in there but hides it. I'd prefer to be able to just get info for those people who is on my phone contacts and no one else.
I also want less syncing happening on my phone. As of this posting, Facebook still downloads low res pictures and ignores its own sync rules.
Does anyone here have any suggestions as what I can do to merge the info I need so I can unlink Facebook and just have contacts-sync pull the photos instead?
Thanks!
P.S: for those who are using the XDA app and can't see my signature, this is on the Samsung Galaxy S3 i9300 (International) phone.
On all my previous devices, from an Android 4 tablet to a Samsung Galaxy S6, the Contacts app had a neat feature that allowed you to choose which contacts to display (in Contacts, Phone, and make accessible to any other app with access to contacts list).
You could choose between:
all contacts
contacts from a specific account (choose from Phone, SIM, gmail account, etc)
custom list (checklist from multiple accounts and groups defined within each account)
S9/S9+ Contacts app simply shows you all contacts from all accounts, with no option to narrow down the selection.
In the Contacts app (only) you can have it display contacts from one account, or one group from an account.
However all apps that have access to contacts see and use all contacts from all accounts, regardless. That includes Phone app, ofcourse (the only option in Phone is to display all or contacts with phone nr. only).
I had great use of that feature because I had it use only contacts from specific groups.
Now I have a lot of clutter.
Samsung official response was: that feature was intentionally removed from Contacts app.
I couldn't find many viable alternatives on Play store, I tried a few, mostly bloatware, apparently. Also, Google Contacts, while still having some sort of filtering builtin, can't seem to integrate it properly.
I am looking for a way to regain that level of filtering what contacts to use, without rooting the phone (I got it from work and could get into a lot of trouble if I root it).
Thank you.
Its still there if this what you mean
mjrshark said:
Its still there if this what you mean
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, that is not it.
That is only a display selection in Contacts app only. You can choose to display one account or one group, but no multiple selection of accounts/groups.
Furthermore, this has no effect on the contacts exported to all apps, including Phone. Phone will still show you the entire list of contacts, regardless of what you are looking at in Contacts app.
The following were taken from a Huawei P7 I still have, they illustrate what I also had in older and newer (at least S6):
Open contacts app (or via Phone->contacts).
Open menu
Choose "Contacts to display".
S9 contacts only allow you to limit displayed contacts to those with phone number.
What is missing is the selection of a single account and customize (bottom)
In this screen I selected one entire account (phone) and only one group from the gmail account:
Only these contacts will be visible (on Huawei P7, Samsung S6 and others) in Phone app, SMS app, etc.
Samsunt S9 shows all contacts from all accounts in Phone app, SMS app, etc.
So how to re add this option on new S9 10 ? someone found a solution ?
I installed app inspector and I noticed application called za-hooc and it's package name com.transsion.premissionprotect I tried to look up online but no luck so what this app actually does?
IM looking za-hock
esmailelbob said:
I installed app inspector and I noticed application called za-hooc and it's package name com.transsion.premissionprotect I tried to look up online but no luck so what this app actually does?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Za-Hooc security, a TECNO’s in-house privacy protection system for phones they produce and sell.
Apps that have access to calendar, contacts, call logs, sms will only scan empty lists of calendars, call logs, contacts, sms.
For example, the contacts app has a lot of important contacts, but you're using a Facebook app that forces you to give it permissions. Now "za hooc" has the effect of providing the Facebook application with an empty list of contacts
With Android 11, Google seems to have taken yet another step in the "making Android increasingly painful to use" direction by disabling the ability for device-only contacts to be available via the standard Contacts Provider. Because of this, I have to use Google-stored contacts on my Android 11 device in order for these contacts to be available to my apps. Otherwise, my apps don't see any contacts.
I have a rooted Android 11 device, and I'm hoping that there is some way that I could disable the standard Contacts Provider service and that I could then install an alternate, custom Contacts Provider service which knows how to access device-only contacts, and which knows how to make these contacts available to all apps that need contacts ... and which never will try to store my contacts on any of Google's servers nor anywhere else in the cloud.
Is it possible to disable Android's standard Contacts Provider service? And does such a 3rd-party Contacts Provider service exist?
Thank you in advance for any thoughts and suggestions.
Well, I think I found a solution to the issue that I'm trying to solve. And it doesn't require any new Contacts Provider service to be installed, after all.
First of all, I made sure that contacts syncing is turned off.
Next, I installed the "True Phone" contacts and phone manager app from the play store and made it my default phone app.
Then, I used that program to make a local backup of my contacts, which is one of its capabilities.
Following that, I froze the Contacts app, but I kept the Contacts Storage app active. I checked the permissions for the Contacts Storage app, and I see now that it has no network-related permssions. So apparently, it just looks at the local contacts database, and some other piece of software is what actually syncs Google's cloud-based contacts data with the local database. And by turning off contacts sync-ing, it seems like I have indeed disabled that process.
Then, I went from my desktop computer to http://contacts.google.com with the same login credentials that are associated with my Android device. I then permanently deleted all of the contacts there.
(I rebooted my Android device between each of these steps and also after the final step.)
Now, my SMS and phone apps still see the contacts info in my local database. And I can manage the local contacts backup and restore via that True Phone app.
There are probably other phone/contacts apps which also could be used for this. But True Phone works well enough for me.
So ... it turns out that no OS surgery is needed to mess with the contacts nor to install an alternate Contacts Provider service.
PS: And I now have learned something. I was asking about a "Contacts Provider service", but I now realize that the standard Contacts Storage app itself seems to be the "Contacts Provider".
And because I found out that this app does not even have network permissions, it seems clear that this app simply gets contacts from the locally stored sqlite contacts database, and therefore, I don't need to replace this app with anything else.
And so all I needed to do was disable contacts sync-ing, because that is what would sync contacts between Google's cloud and the local contacts database.
How long were you playing with it to get to this point? Fun times...
Cloud apps can be little terrors, the only one I use is Gmail. It's never been breached by malware in over 15 years. Lol, Outlook not so much so.
blackhawk said:
How long were you playing with it to get to this point? Fun times...
Cloud apps can be little terrors, the only one I use is Gmail. It's never been breached by malware in over 15 years. Lol, Outlook not so much so.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It took me around a day of on-and-off playing around sessions to figure this all out ... with some input from a few other helpful souls.
I agree about cloud-based services. I don't even use gmail. I run my own email server, so I use that to manage all my email accounts. I manage my own web servers and my own DNS servers, as well.
It's more work for me to manage those things, but I don't mind, and I actually enjoy that work, most of the time.