Fake contacts

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Today we present an application to you Open source ¹ really bizarre and maybe even a little useless. But the concept is beautiful and we therefore like the idea of talking about it! Fake contacts in fact he will try to poison the data. More precisely, it will try to make the algorithms of the companies that try to track you believe that you are full of new friends.

This application is more of a game than anything else, if you want to try it, make a backup of your contacts first!

The concept and use of this app is very simple and fun at the same time. The problem that many of you already know is that many applications spy on contacts ² that you have and then perhaps keep them for yourself or even resell them to third parties such as already happened in the past.

There are several solutions to this problem.

The first, for example, is to not give any unreliable applications permission to access your contacts. This solution works very well even if there are some doubts about Google if you use a classic and unmodified Android (as may be /And/ for example) given that Google's servers are constantly contacted ³.

Fake contacts

Another solution, which we talked about some time ago, is to move all your contacts to OpenContacts. This way you will have your real contacts empty and therefore you will be able to authorize any application to read them. Your real contacts they will be safe inside OpenContacts which cannot be seen by any other application and does not even have an internet connection. It's as if you had your contacts on a piece of paper to always carry with you.

In this case, however, some things could be more complicated than expected. OpenContacts in fact it does not allow it to be read by any other application, therefore if you use your mobile phone contacts for Send an email, Signal or other messages this might start to get difficult.

So that's why we're also talking to you about Fake contacts. What this application does is very simple and in jargon it is called "data poisoning“. In practice together with your real contacts fake contacts are mixed in to be fed to companies that try to track you. This way you will make his life more complex.

How does it work?

Using this application is very simple. You will be given an initial template with 'x' first names and 'y' last names. You can also give a template for the telephone number by, for example, +39 instead of the default +21. Finally, you can also add an email for each contact. By pressing on 'Create Fake Contacts” contacts will be added (by default they all start with Z so as not to clog up the address book).

To remove them, simply leave the template used intact and press "Delete Fake Contacts“.

Unfortunately, however, we fear that real data poisoning would only occur if a very large number of users used this type of application, as long as only a small part uses it it is perhaps almost completely useless.

As we were saying, however, it seems like a nice and fun idea to us if you want to try to annoy to the various companies that try to track everything you do and resell your data you might consider giving it a try.

Unfortunately, the application is abandoned to itself (some integrations could have been interesting) but it does not require any permission other than to read and modify your contacts and therefore should not be a problem.

1. source code on GitHub[↩]
2. Over 1,000 Android apps were found to steal your data. Here's what you can do[↩]
3. New report claims Google collects user data “passively” without proper consent, company calls it “wildly misleading”[↩]

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