The address book¶

Research brief, The Morporkian Civil Liberties Union (MCLU). Open file.

A person is asked to hand over their own contacts, and does, because it is their address book and they are entitled to it.

In it are four hundred people. Who they call and how often. Who they stopped calling in March. Which two names appear beside each other so consistently that the relationship is obvious to anyone reading, including the relationship neither party has mentioned to their families.

The content of every conversation stays private. The shape of them does not, and the shape is frequently the revealing part.

Nobody in that book agreed to be in it. They agreed to know somebody.

• When one person discloses their own contacts, what have the other four hundred disclosed?

• Can a person consent to the mapping of a relationship that is not theirs alone?

What an upload actually takes¶

• What contact-upload actually transfers when a service asks for the address book, read from the terms and checked against behaviour.

• Whether any authority has ruled on the non-user whose details arrive through somebody else’s upload, and what remedy was available to them.

• The lawful basis a service claims for holding details of people who have no account with it.

• Traffic and metadata rules under ePrivacy, which may reach further than data protection does here.

• Evidence on what social-graph data reveals as against message content. We believe it is substantial. Believing is not citing.

Last updated: 17 September 2026