Do I have to enable contacts permission to use Shakepay?
No.
If you enable the phone contacts permission, you will have the added ability to send money to your phone contacts on Shakepay. If you don’t, no big deal, all other Shakepay features will work as expected.
Does Shakepay store my phone contacts on their servers?
No.
When phone contact permissions are enabled, the Shakepay app cryptographically hashes and truncates your contacts’ numbers and sends them to our servers.
Instead of receiving a list of your phone contacts in human readable form (like 514-555-1234), the hashes being sent look like this:
[
'35d4782d5e',
'3e5d321d61',
...
]
And they're hard to reverse, meaning having any of these hashes doesn't let you guess the phone number behind it.
When our servers receive this list of hashes, we'll try to match them with other Shakers that have enabled the discovery feature. Once that's done, we'll discard the entire list so it's never stored in our database.
This whole setup allows us to find your friends on Shakepay without ever receiving your list of phone contacts. We learned this nifty trick from the privacy-minded chat app Signal.
Will my friends know I’m on Shakepay without my consent?
No.
We always ask for consent before making you available for discovery by phone number. You also have the option to enable/disable this feature at any time in your Security & privacy settings.
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