This is how Android 17 will protect your contacts

Every day, as we install new apps on our smartphones, we are confronted with authorization requests that are often disproportionate to the actual features offered by the software.

This dynamic represents a real risk to users’ privacy, especially when the data requested concerns highly sensitive information such as our list of acquaintances and colleagues.

Android 17 wants to change this status quo.

Android 17, new contact picker to improve privacy

Currently, the operating system blocks indiscriminate access to certain types of sensitive information, such as the photo gallery or the contacts.

However, permission management is often not very flexible: the main problem lies in the fact that, by granting an application permission to access the phone book, you effectively hand over the entire contact list with no possibility to apply an effective filter.

The changes are set to come with the arrival of Android 17. As confirmed in a recent update on the official developers blog, Google will introduce a new native tool called Contact Picker.

This feature, first spotted during testing last November, has been officially designed to ensure a much more accurate and specific protection of information.

The basic mechanism will mirror the user experience of the Photo Picker already familiar to users: instead of requesting a global and absolute permission through the old command READ_CONTACTS, the new system will use the directive Intent.ACTION_PICK_CONTACTS.

In this way, apps running on the device will be able to view and interact only with the individual cards that the user actively chooses to share at that exact moment.

Granularity and temporary permissions

A fundamental aspect of the new API is the introduction of support for granular data requests.

Apps will continue to routinely request permission to access the contacts, but in Android 17 they will have the ability to specify exactly which information fields are necessary for their proper operation.

For example, if a service only needs phone numbers to send a message, it can limit itself to requesting that single data (Phone.CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE), avoiding taking the entire card including e-mail or physical addresses.

The user will be able to select one or more contacts at once in a very simple way, while developers will have the ability to set a maximum limit on the number of profiles that can be selected in a single session.

Additionally for ecosystem security, read access to these specific details will have a strictly temporary duration.

Development guidelines

The new Contact Picker will not only improve the management of the main address book, but will extend its reach to information distributed across different areas of the operating environment.

Android 17 will indeed support reading contacts from other user profiles configured on the same device, including cloned apps and protected private spaces.

The Mountain View company, through comprehensive documentation released on its portal, has strongly urged developers to start updating their apps.

The official guidance is to rigorously limit requests to only the strictly necessary fields, an essential practice to maintain high security standards and, at the same time, provide a safe and optimal user experience to anyone using a smartphone.