"Bluesky" Launches "Find Friends" Feature with Enhanced Privacy

SadaNews - The "Bluesky" network, a competitor to the platforms "X" and "Threads", has announced the launch of a new feature for finding friends, which it claims has been designed from the ground up with strict respect for users' privacy, without relying on the annoying automatic invitation methods that have become notorious in other social networks.

The new feature allows users to match with friends already in their phone contacts, but under one essential condition: both parties must agree to use the feature.

The company asserted that this approach is fundamentally different from the traditional methods that have often been misused in the past, according to a report published by "TechCrunch" and reviewed by "Al Arabiya Business".

"Bluesky" explained that importing contacts has historically been the most effective way to find acquaintances within social applications, but it is also susceptible to leakage or exploitation, whether through selling phone numbers to spammers or using them for dubious marketing purposes.

For this reason, the company states that it has developed a fundamentally safer approach to protect users' data.

Unlike what many applications are accustomed to, "Bluesky" confirmed that it will not send automatic invitations to contacts who are not on the platform, even if the user permits uploading their address book.

Instead, the user can manually and intentionally send an invitation to a specific friend, without any automation.

To use the "Find Friends" feature, the user is first required to confirm their phone number via a six-digit code sent via text message before uploading contacts. This step aims to prevent malicious actors from uploading random numbers to gather information about "Bluesky" users.

The company indicates that it may take some time for friends to appear in this feature, as matching will only occur when both parties have uploaded their contacts and each is in the other's address book.

For those who do not wish to be found by work colleagues or acquaintances from real life, they can simply ignore the feature and not activate it.

On the technical security level, "Bluesky" claims to store contact data in an encrypted and divided format, where the user's number is combined with the contact numbers, making reconstruction or reversal of the data more challenging.

Additionally, the encryption keys are stored separately from the company's database, and users can delete their data and unsubscribe at any time.

"Bluesky" has previously made the details of this technology available to the cybersecurity community via an RFC document for feedback prior to the launch.

The feature has started to gradually roll out to "Bluesky" users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in a move that reflects the platform's efforts to balance growth with privacy protection.