How to separate private contacts from work contacts

Using /e/OS Applications
1

Dear community

I would love to be able have my private contacts in the regular contacts-app of my /e/phone. However, in urgent cases it would also be useful to have my work contacts (>100 contacts) on my phone. However, I don’t want them to show up every time I use my phone to send a private message or call someone.

Does anyone have a good idea, how I could have my work contacts on the side, syncing to our carddav server from work, but not showing up anywhere in apps directly? I imagine being able to access them via a separate contact-book only, is there such an app?

On a previous phone I had installed separate main-accounts on my phone, one for work and one for private. But that had cost me a lot of time (installing various apps twice, updating them, etc.) and a lot of internal memory. So I abandonded this again pretty soon).

cheers and thanks in advance
chris

p.s. contact-groups could be an option, the feature might come sometime to /e/ according to this thread. Add a group for contacts
But I’m afraid, that even tough in the contacts app the groups are separate, as soon as I start typing a number I will get suggestions from both, etc. all being mixed in auto-fill procedures…

2

Do you use shelter? In shelter you can everything separated from main profile.
It will be no problem to sync your work contacts / appointments and more in shelter adress book / calendar.

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3

Interesting app, thank you very much for the info. Had never heard about it before, and by looking it up I’ve also learned that newish android versions have some kind of workprofile (which shelter relies on). It seems to me that in /e/ this workprofile is hidden from me somehow, I don’t seem to be able to access it in the settings. (but if I enter it in the search box, I get to a page where it says the workprofile is active).
I’ve also realised that for my case, where I need access to work contacts about once a week only, it might actually be overkill to sync these work contacts via carddav. I should probably just make a desktop-link to the website of our groupware, from where I can access the contacts too if needed.

4

You can have contacts separated from the main contacts list on the system with the app OpenContacts.

Every time apps check the contact list, they always check the main contact list of the system.

This OpenContacts app is different and won’t be checked, apps don’t syphon the data from there, even if they do it otherwise with the contact list.

5

thank you, I’ll try that next!

6

hi community,
interesting how to avoid the ziphoning of contacts by google or other FB. my question is: if I install an application which asks for authorization to contacts

  1. the contacts are sucked and memorized immediately?
  2. if I delete the app, will this data disappear from the app’s servers? thank you
7

My two cents:

  1. Depends on the app. Some do, others don’t. For users oftentimes difficult to find out. Two examples: Signal messenger-app I think does not store contact data or only a very short time, Whatsapp on the other side probably keeps contacts on a central server (and processes them further into their datapool from facebook, most likely)

  2. In a perfect world (the one /e/ is aiming for?), that’s how it would work. In our world, most likely your data stays there and will be (ab-) used for other things. Or just forgotten. Who knows.

Cheers

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