Bluesky launches a “privacy-first” contact import feature in select countries

Bluesky is rolling out Find Friends, a contact import feature designed to help users discover people they know on the platform. With Find Friends, users verify their phone number and upload their contacts; when both parties in a contact list have enabled the feature and verified their numbers, each will be notified of the match, either immediately or by notification if the match occurs later.

To address privacy concerns, Bluesky requires that both users have each other's numbers in their respective contact lists and have opted into Find Friends for any matching to take place. If a user never enables this feature, they remain undiscoverable through it. Bluesky's process includes a mandatory step for users to prove ownership of their phone number, preventing malicious actors from uploading random numbers to identify existing users on the service.

Security measures ensure that phone numbers are stored as hashed pairs, using a combination of the user's number and each contact's number, making it considerably harder to reverse-engineer. This encrypted data is associated with a hardware security key that remains outside Bluesky's databases. Users retain full control, with the option to delete their uploaded contacts and opt out of Find Friends at any time. The feature is launching initially for mobile app users in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.