{"id":231712,"date":"2026-04-06T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/06\/android-17s-contact-picker-is-the-privacy-upgrade-we-needed-years-ago\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T08:50:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T12:50:11","slug":"android-17s-contact-picker-is-the-privacy-upgrade-we-needed-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/06\/android-17s-contact-picker-is-the-privacy-upgrade-we-needed-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"Android 17’s Contact Picker is the privacy upgrade we needed years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

Android 17’s Contact Picker is the privacy upgrade we needed years ago<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.makeuseof.com\/this-new-android-privacy-feature-is-actually-brilliant\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-04-06 08:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.makeuseof.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Apps want too much of your personal data, and it’s the job of your mobile operating system to prevent them from getting it without permission. Deciding whether to grant data permissions to Android apps is hardly a choice, though. Some apps won’t work until you authorize the necessary data and privacy permissions required. Granular permissions managers on Android are still few and far between \u2014 if you need to share a single contact record with an app in Android 16, you must give that app access to all of your contacts.<\/p>\n

Android 17 is about to change that in a major way. You’ve probably encountered Android’s system-wide Photo Picker, introduced in Android 13, that lets you grant apps access to individual photos or videos instead of handing everything over. Android 17 will apply the same user interface, and the privacy protections that come with it, to contact sharing. The Contact Picker will give you complete control over which contacts your phone shares with apps, and it can’t come soon enough.<\/p>\n

\n If you grant contact sharing permissions to an app, it gets access to everything
\n <\/h3>\n

Think about all the data stored in your contacts \u2014 names, phone numbers, emails, addresses, photos, and notes. The most important contact information for your friends and family is stored on your Android phone, and will be handed over to apps that request it with a single button press. Neither the app nor the user can specify exactly which contact fields or records are shared when permission is granted. It’s an unfortunate limitation, because if you need to provide app access to just one contact stored on your Android phone, you must allow access to every single one of your contacts. <\/p>\n

This is because Android app developers use the READ_CONTACTS permission to request access to a user’s device contacts. As Google admits on the Android Developers Blog, “while functional, this approach often granted…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Android 17’s Contact Picker is the privacy upgrade we needed years ago https:\/\/www.makeuseof.com\/this-new-android-privacy-feature-is-actually-brilliant\/ Publish Date:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":231713,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static0.makeuseofimages.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/wm\/2026\/04\/android-contact-picker-5.jpg?w=1600&h=900&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[70],"class_list":["post-231712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-android","tag-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231712"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231714,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231712\/revisions\/231714"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}