# The Difficulty Of Private Contact Discovery

DevFeed: [The Difficulty Of Private Contact Discovery](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-difficulty-of-private-contact-discovery-1749.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/>)

Published: 2014-01-03T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Signal Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/signal-blog.md>)

Topics: [Graphs](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/graphs.md>), [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/migration.md>), [OAuth](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/oauth.md>), [coding](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/coding.md>)

Tags: [apps](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/apps.md>), [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/migration.md>), [mobile](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/mobile.md>), [oauth](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/oauth.md>), [privacy](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/privacy.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>)

## AI overview

The article examines the difficulty of private contact discovery in communication software. It explains how mobile device contacts can help users find friends already registered with a service, while uploading an entire address book to a server creates significant privacy concerns.

## Source excerpt

Building a social network is not easy. Social networks have value proportional to their size, so participants aren't motivated to join new social networks which aren't already large. It's a paradox where if people haven't already joined, people aren't motivated to join. The trouble is that while building a social network is hard, most interesting software today is acutely "social." Even privacy-enhancing technology, which seems anathema to the aesthetic of social networking, is tremendously social. For people to effectively use private communication software like TextSecure, they need to be able to know how to contact their friends using TextSecure. Read more...