Bluesky introduces a private ‘Find Your Friends’ feature without inviting spam

Bluesky, the social network that competes with X and Threads, is launching a friend-finding system that it says respects users’ privacy, the company announced Wednesday. To work, the app matches you with the friends you save in your phone’s address book – unless all people are signed in.

“Contact import has been a very effective way to find people you know on social media, but it has been underutilized or abused by the platform,” the company explained in a statement. to announce. “Even when encrypted, phone numbers are bypassed or hacked, sold to spammers, or used by platforms for dubious purposes.”

In addition, social media programs in the past often used communication as a guiding tool. That is, if the program detects that you have friends who are not on its service, it will prompt you to “add”. This will send the friend an invitation via text message. In most cases, the recipient will not appreciate this spam, though.

Unfortunately, a way he is long has been effectiveand it helped the software to contain viruses, because some of the invited people could download and try the software out of curiosity. However, despite the first method, this method can create. and not a sure way locking out users for a long time. (Although it may help social media find and At the exitwhen the market is open to M&A!)

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

In fact, it allows users to send invitations to friends directly – but this is an intentional process, which the user must do. (Because these are your messages from your friends, you can’t opt ​​out of receiving an invite, however.)

To use the Find Friends feature, you must first verify your phone number by entering the six digits sent via SMS before adding your friends. This prevents malicious actors from sending random numbers to gain access to Bluesky users’ information, the company says.

Early adopters should note that syncing contacts may take some time, but more people will start to see the screen as more and more Bluesky users download their contacts to sync. You’re only friends if both you and your friend have each other in your address books.

If you don’t want to be found by people you know from work or your real life, you can choose not to use the feature.

Bluesky says it stores uploaded data in pairs, where your number is combined with everyone else’s number. This makes the data difficult to convert for engineers, the company says. Data storage 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 the ones you downloaded and log out. Technical details have already been developed the presence of a security group such as an RFCto request feedback prior to implementation.

The app is available to Bluesky users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the United States.