Does Telegram add other people's contacts? This is the norm.

I have been using Telegram for several years. Everything is fine, but some strange detail began to confuse some time ago: from time to time Telegram independently added unknown people to my contacts, accompanying it with a notification that they had registered with Telegram. In general, Telegram should not show the phone numbers of people who are not in your phone book, but for such spontaneously appearing contacts I also saw a phone number. It all looked like it was contacts from my phone book. But they were not there. Then I decided that Telegram automatically adds to my contacts those people who have added my phone number to their phone book. Since my phone number was indicated on one small site several years ago, I decided that some of the few visitors for some reason added me to their phone books,

But as Telegram grew in popularity, there were more and more such obscure contacts, and as a result there were even more of them than the people I know. I began to doubt that all these people could add my number to their phone books without ever calling. The user names were even more embarrassed - it seemed that they were using not the name that the user indicated for himself, but the name under which this user could be written in the phone book of an outsider, because there were specific notes and prefixes.

I contacted one of these contacts, and my fears were justified:



I knew that once my friend worked at UNET. But to connect him with these strange contacts did not work right away. It took some effort to recall one curious moment from the past. About a year ago, my phone suddenly stopped seeing the network of the service provider. Everything else worked fine, so I assumed that the failure was not in the phone, but the SIM card itself, which was more than 10 years old, was out of order. My friend just looked at the guests, and we decided, without any further thoughts, to check the phone’s performance using its SIM card. The phone turned on, found a network - it became obvious that you need to request a new SIM card from the operator. Another minute - and the SIM card returned to its owner’s phone. The next day I already had a new SIM card, and I safely forgot about

And so, a year later it turns out that there were contacts on that SIM card, and Telegram managed to implicitly save them on its server in a certain hidden list, which it uses to automatically add contacts, and which for some reason is never cleared. This list includes all the contacts that Telegram has been able to reach at least once in the past. It's not just about contacts in the phone book. With equal success, it remembers those who were once added to your Skype (and apparently who had the phone number there), and even if you deleted this user on Skype for a long time - Telegram still stores this information in itself, and will automatically add this user to your contacts when he joins Telegram.

One would think that Google contacts synchronization could get a little worse, but no. Google maintains its contact list and does not arbitrarily “steal” them from other sources. But just in case, I checked if Google had copied the contacts from my friend’s SIM card to me - no, there are only the contacts added by me personally.

A small survey showed that several friends had a similar problem. The most common scenario - someone allowed his friend on his smartphone to log in under his Google account for some purpose. After which, of course, this account was deleted from the smartphone - but Telegram remembered the contacts of others forever, and began to annoy those who shared their smartphone once by automatically adding unknown people to their contacts.

Among my friends there are Telegram fans who defend any decision made by the developers, and they also began to defend such unexpected behavior of this messenger. However, I fundamentally disagree with this. This diligent collection of contacts can lead to very unpleasant consequences. For example, maybe you would not want someone to find out that you have a certain number in your phone book. Or for some number you can indicate some extravagant name, which is not at all for prying eyes. In my opinion, this mechanism should be redesigned in such a way as to notify and automatically add to Telegram contacts only those people who are in your phone book at the moment, without any shadow and eternal lists.

In addition to Telegram, I also have Viber installed, and it also notifies me that someone from the phone book has joined. But at the same time, he does not “remember” the contacts that accidentally appeared on this phone a year ago. This mechanism should work in a similar way in Telegram.

TL; DR

Telegram scans all your contacts on your smartphone in order to automatically find the corresponding Telegram contacts, and this is not unexpected. Unwanted behavior is that it stores a hidden list of all the phone numbers displayed on your devices and their associated names, and never clears it. This list is used to automatically add newly arrived Telegram users to your contacts. If you once used a friend’s SIM card on which some phone numbers were stored, or you allowed a friend to temporarily add his Google account to your smartphone - Telegram will forever remember your friends' contact lists and even after a year will automatically add new arrivals unfamiliar to you people.

The proposed solution is to use the Telegram auto-add contact mechanism exclusively for current phone numbers that are currently available on user devices with active Telegram sessions.

Vote for the solution to this problem!

I did not find a separate bug tracker for Telegram as a whole, so I created a ticket in the bug tracker of the desktop version of Telegram, however, it was closed because the problem is supposedly not in the desktop client. But you can remind about this problem to Pavel Durov and the Telegram team via Twitter. Also, desktop client developers recommend reporting problems through the Settings → Support → Ask a question function in the mobile application. Your complaint will be read by a volunteer who can (if he considers it significant enough) send this information to the Telegram developers. The more people pay attention to a problem and express dissatisfaction, the faster it will be resolved.

Below is a survey. I recommend that you look into your Telegram contacts (Menu → Contacts, not the chat list) and check if there are people unknown to you. It is possible that in the past you inadvertently merged someone else's contacts into your Telegram, and did not even pay attention to it. If you do not use Telegram, just click on the “Refrain” button.