Contact sync and privacy

Kit Pay finds the people you know by phone number, which means it has to work with your contacts — and anything that touches a phone book owes you a precise explanation, not a soothing one. Here is exactly what happens.

What is shared, and when

Nothing leaves your phone until you allow contact access, and the app works without it — you can always add people one at a time. If you do allow it, the app shares contact entries to match against Kit Pay accounts, and the sync is scoped: it can cover your address book or a chosen part of it, and each sync round is tracked so stale data can be superseded rather than accumulating forever.

What Kit Pay keeps, stated plainly

• Kit Pay keeps a copy of the synced entries — that is what makes matching and your contact list work across sessions. This is a real copy, and you deserve to know it exists.
• Phone numbers in that copy are stored encrypted, with a separate fingerprint used for matching — so finding "who is on Kit Pay" does not require handling your contacts' numbers in the clear.
• Entries carry the display name you had for the person and the sync round they came from, so newer syncs replace older pictures of your phone book.
• The copy is yours in the sense that matters: it exists to serve your account, and the privacy policy governs how it is handled. Deleting your account is covered honestly in account deletion and your data.

What this is not

Contact sync is matching infrastructure, not surveillance of your social life. Your contacts are not shown to other users — someone having your number in their phone book has never meant you see their address book, and the same holds in reverse. Matching tells each side the same single fact: this number belongs to a Kit Pay user. And your conversations are a separate world entirely, built for end-to-end encryption — the contact copy is about who you can reach, never what you said.