Our Two Cents: Contact Tracing

The many perils of sharing phone contacts.

A fairly innocuous—yet definitely dated—contact listing in a friend of the author’s phone.

Everyone has their own way of keeping track of the contacts in their phone: My own contact list includes “Paul Dana’s Friend,” “Debbi Tennis,” “Kerri Hairdresser” and “Farm Jess”—as well as plenty of people whose names I should’ve input with a helpful descriptor. (If you know who Robert Harte is, LMK.) Most of the time a name like “Farm Jess” is helpful—when I see it I automatically remember that she was my boss when I picked strawberries at Burhmaster Farms for a summer almost a decade ago. But when you start sharing those contacts (which is the easiest and fastest way to give someone someone else’s phone number), things can get a bit tricky—especially when the over-share of info is about the third person, the innocent outsider whose number you asked for.