Sunshine Contacts may have given out your home address, even if you’re not using the app – ProWellTech

A third-party contacts app that you don’t use may be giving out your home address to users. Earlier in November Yahoo CEO and Google Veteran Marissa Mayer and co-founder Enrique Muñoz Torres introduced their newly renamed startup Sunshine and its first product. Sunshine contacts. The new iOS app offers the ability to organize your address book by processing duplicates and merges using AI technology. In addition, some of the missing information can be supplemented by collecting data from the Internet, e.g. B. through LinkedIn profiles.

But some users were surprised that they suddenly had private addresses for their contacts, even for those who were not yet Sunshine users.

ProWellTech reached out to Sunshine to better understand the situation, given the potential privacy concerns.

We know there are several ways that users can come across someone’s home address in the Sunshine app. Of course, a user might already have the address saved in their phone’s address book, or they might have chosen to allow Sunshine to scan their inbox to extract information from email signature lines. This is a feature that is common to other personal CRM solutions Contact.

If someone has signed an e-mail with the private address given in this field, this data can be added to their contact card in the Sunshine app. In this case, the contact card will be updated in the Sunshine Contacts app which will then be synced with your phone’s address book. However, this data is not distributed to other app users.

The app also enhances contact cards with information that has been captured in other ways. For example, it may use the information you need to fill in any missing fields – such as adding a last name if you had other details that included someone’s full name but didn’t completely fill out the card. The app may also be able to get data from A. LinkedIn Profile, if available.

For private addresses, Sunshine uses the White pages API.

The company confirmed to ProWellTech that it will expand contact cards with home addresses under certain circumstances, even if that contact is not a Sunshine Contacts user. According to Sunshine, this is no different from a user who goes to Google to search the web for contact information. It just automates the process.

Of course, some would argue that when you are talking about automating home address collection for hundreds or possibly thousands of users – depending on the size of your personal address book database – it’s a bit different than googling to find your aunt’s Address so you can mail a Christmas card or call your old college roommate to find out where to send his birthday present.

However, Sunshine made it clear to ProWellTech that the home address will only be added if it is determined that you have a personal connection with the contact in question.

Here, however, Sunshine enters a gray area where the app and its technology are trying to figure out who you know well enough to need a home address.

Before adding the address, you have to save the phone number of the contact in your address book with Sunshine, not just their e-mail address. That would, for example, eliminate some people with whom you are loosely connected through just work. And it will only update with the home address if the affiliate API can associate that address with a phone number you have.

Additionally, Sunshine says it is generally able to understand the type of phone number you have stored – for example, if it is a home or business line, or if it is a landline or cell phone number. (APIs are used for this, similar to StrikeIron’s though not this particular one.) It also knows who the phone number belongs to. Using this information and the wider context, the app tries to determine whether a phone number is personal or professional and tries to understand your relationship with the person who owns that number.

In practice, this means that if all of the information you had on file for a contact was professional information, that person’s contact card would be – where they worked, a job title, a work email address, and possibly a phone number Not updated to include their home address.

And because many people use their personal cell for work, Sunshine will not consider someone a “personal” relationship just because they have their cell phone number. For example, if you only had a contact’s name and cell phone number, you wouldn’t be able to use the app to get their home address.

The result of all this automated analysis is that, in theory, Sunshine will only update contact cards with home addresses that are determined to have a personal relationship.

Of course, this does not take into account some scenarios such as bad exes, stalking or the general desire for privacy. There are times when someone has a lot of personal information for a contact in their address book, but that contact would rather not have their home address given to that person.

Probably the only way to prevent this from happening is to log out of the source: Whitepages.com. (Once you have your profile url from the whitepages website you can Use this online form to have your information suppressed.)

How the app works these days raises questions about truly private information.

Sunshine points out that people’s home addresses are not as hidden as they might think, which makes them a fair game.

It is true that our home addresses are often publicly available. Although it’s been years since most of us had one phone book On our doorstep with phone and address lists for people in our city, home addresses are relatively trivial these days if you know where to look online.

In addition to public records – such as voter registration databases – there are also web-based people searchers.

Sunshine’s partner Whitepages.com makes visitors pay for their data, but others like TruePeopleSearch.com don’t share the same paywall. Using a person’s first and last name and city, the website provides access to home address, previous addresses, mobile phone, age, and the names of family members and other close associates. (TruePeopleSearch is not a Sunshine Affiliate, we should be clear.)

Although this data is “public”, it is inconvenient to see it casually in an app as it is even easier to access than before.

After years of being burned to death by data breaches and privacy scandals, they tend to protect their personal information better than before. And if asked, many would likely refuse to share their home addresses with Sunshine’s user base. In general, people appreciate the courtesy of having someone ask for a home address when they need to – they may not want an app that crawls the web to find and distribute it.

Sunshine Contacts is in a beta version in the USA, in which only invitations are possible. Therefore, the company has time to review the implementation of this feature based on user feedback before it becomes generally available.