Wednesday, September 19, 2012

iOS 6 and Contacts Privacy Settings


The latest version of iOS released on September 19th, iOS 6, adds additional privacy settings beyond what was available in earlier releases. In particular, you now have the ability to turn off access to Contacts on a per application basis. The first time you run Dive Log under iOS 6 you will (or should) be asked to grant Dive Log access to your Contacts. We'd recommend that you choose to grant access to Contacts for Dive Log to continue to enjoy the full integration of your Dive Buddies with Contacts on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. You can change your election for Dive Log's access to Contacts at a later date if you like.

To change your privacy selection for Dive Log's access to Contacts you'll want to start the Settings app on your device and select the "Privacy" settings and then select "Contacts" and then change the switch next to Dive Log to the reflect your choice.

You are always in control of what Dive Log does with your Contacts. Dive Log does not transmit any information off your device without your explicit control. Dive Log uses access to your contacts to allow you to add Buddies to your logbook from your existing Contacts on your device (you can also create a new Contact directly from within Dive Log). When you create a "linked" Buddy in this way, Dive Log will store some information about the contact in your logbook database. This information is used to re-establish the link to your Contact when Dive Log starts up or when your Contacts changes (through another app, the Contacts application itself or via syncing with iTunes or iCloud) and to display that Buddy's related information within Dive Log. If you choose to sync your Dive Log logbook with one of the compatible desktop applications (see Dive Log Sync for more information about compatible desktop applications), any Contact data that was stored in your logbook when you added the Buddy is available in the desktop application. This allows the desktop to display your Buddy's information even if your full Contacts database is not available on the desktop computer. It is important to note that you are in full control of syncing your logbook to any compatible desktop application and the logbook is sent directly to the computer over the WiFi connection so your Contact information is never exposed on the Internet (of course what you do with the data after that is out of our control). Finally if you'd prefer to not link Buddies to Contacts within Dive Log, you can always choose to use the "Buddy without Contact" option when adding new Buddies to Dive Log. This option will populate the Buddy's information in the Dive Log logbook with the information you enter at the time and will not import any data from Contacts. You may still see this Buddy as "linked" in the future if the information in Dive Log matches a Contact in your contacts so that you can still view the full Contact information with Dive Log but the Dive Log logbook will still only contain the information that you entered directly.