Viber no contacts and no activation code

You collect names and phone numbers. It is different from other major social networks: Twitter does not require that I share my contacts, neither does Facebook, nor does Voxer (another app similar to yours, although, to be fair, they bug a lot to share your contacts with them - but you still have a choice as a consumer). Your privacy policy has changed since I last visited that, and it seems to now exclude Address Book and related information when sharing with third parties. Without this information Twitter, Facebook, Voxer, and many other social media services have found a way to function. Hiding behind a purposefully designed software does not make it okay for you to demand the address book from people or else...

You did record phone calls in the past, and it was stipulated in your Privacy Policy. I do tend to take close looks at things like that, especially with such a big fat red flag on your service by not allowing use of service without getting a copy of my whole address book for you to SPAM, without my express permission. Yes, the fact that I use Google as my email provider does not constitute an approval for Google to email everyone in my address book that I am using Google and they should too.

Do me a favor, and the next time you reply, try to be less political, and more to the point.

My point was and still is: Do not use a volatile service that requires your whole address book to function. Your own privacy policy that you are bound to by law can be changed by none other than yourselves. To quote:

From time to time, we may revise this Policy. We reserve the right to update or modify this Policy, or any other of our policies or practices, at any time with or without notice.

While your efforts to inspire confidence in your service on public forums may work for some, I know that there's people out there who actually care about their privacy and they will not use Viber for the above mentioned reasons and possibly many others that I am not aware of.

<Edited By Host>

"It is different from other major social networks" -

It is not different from:

- cell companies, whose services we are absolutely sure you are using numerous times a day. They collect more information than we do.

- Unlike what you mentioned, Facebook do collect phone numbers, names, locations, and much much more information than we do.

- Google - same as above.

- Many other examples of very (very) famous applications that hundreds of millions of people use on a daily basis across the world.

Please note - we are not forcing anyone to use our service. What we do say is: we need this limited type of information from your phone in order for us to enable our service. Even if it personally seems outrageous to you, the fact remains that there is NO alternative for us to help our users easily identify each other if it weren't for their phone numbers as their Viber IDs, and maintaining a non-reachable list in our servers of their contacts and their phone numbers, to see which of them installed Viber. We believe this process is very pragmatic, and should not be over-analyzed. We understand how people can turn this into a malicious conspiracy, and we are sorry that they feel that way.

As we said time and again, this model of functionality is used and widely accepted across the globe. We highly respect your opinion and concerns, but unfortunately we don't plan to change this model, especially in light of the fact that we are obliagted by law, through our very clear Privacy Policy, that we will not misuse our users' details. Further more, our Privacy Policy is one of the most strict of its kind, and you can check to verify that.

"You did record phone calls in the past, and it was stipulated in your Privacy Policy" -

We have never recorded our users calls. Period. We have no practical use for that, and it does not agree with our privacy policy.

We did adapt our Privacy Policy at some point so that users feel more comfortable using Viber (and that is why we added the line about the ability to alter it). Ironically, we changed our privacy policy to make it MORE strict and more reassuring. But, now you say that it bothers you.

"without my express permission" -

We do get each and every users' explicit permission upon registration. Check again.

* Lastly, we do believe we are replying very much to the point. It sounds like you are the one being very emotional, instead of having a clear, to-the-point debate, when a company representative is taking the time to respond to you personally (and will cotinue to do so, of course).