Bluesky Launches Privacy-Focused ‘Find Friends’ Feature Without Spam Invitation

Bluesky, the social network that competes with X and Threads, is introducing a find-friends feature that it claims respects users’ privacy, the company announced Wednesday. To work, the app matches you with friends from your saved contacts in your phone’s address book — but only if both people have opted in.

“Importing contacts has always been the most effective way to find people you know in a social networking app, but it’s also poorly implemented or abused by platforms,” ​​the company explained in communication. “Even with encryption, phone numbers have been leaked or extorted, sold to spammers, or used by platforms for dubious purposes. We weren’t willing to accept that risk, so we developed a substantially more secure approach that protects your data.”

Additionally, social networking apps in the past often used contact matching as a lead generation tool. That is, if the app found that you had friends who were not on its service, it would recommend that you “add” them. This will send the friend a text message invitation. Usually, those on the receiving end would not appreciate this app spam.

Unfortunately, the method has long been effective and helped apps go viral, as at least some of the invited users would download and try the app out of curiosity. But despite the initial buzz this method may generate, it is it is not a guaranteed way for long-term user lockout. (Although it might help a social app find an exit when the market is open to M&A!)

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

Instead, it allows users to send an invite to a friend directly — but that’s a deliberate, manual action a user must take. (However, because these are private messages from a friend, you cannot opt ​​out of receiving invitations.)

To use the Find Friends feature, you will first verify your phone number by entering the six-digit code sent to you via SMS before uploading your contacts. This prevents bad actors from uploading random numbers to fish for information about Bluesky users, the company notes.

First-time users should note that it may take a while for contacts to be paired, but more people will start appearing on this screen as more Bluesky users upload their own contacts for pairing. You will only match with friends if you and your friend have each other in your respective address books.

If you prefer not to be found by those you know from work or real life, you can simply choose not to use the feature.

Bluesky says it stores uploaded contact information in hash pairs, where your number is combined with each contact’s number. This makes it harder to reverse the data, the company claims. Data encryption is tied to a hardware key that is also stored separately from the Bluesky database. If you later want to remove your data from Bluesky, you can delete your uploaded contacts and opt out. Details of the technology have already been made available to the security community as an RFCin order to solicit feedback prior to release.

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