Telegram itself adds someone else's contacts? This is the norm

I use Telegram not the first year. Everything is good, but some time ago, one strange detail began to confuse: from time to time Telegram independently added unknown people to my contacts, accompanying it with a notification that they registered with Telegram. In general, Telegram should not show the phone numbers of people who are not in your phone book, but for such spontaneously appearing contacts I saw the phone number. Everything looked as if it were contacts from my phone book. But they were not there. Then I decided that Telegram automatically adds to my contacts those people who added my phone number to my phone book. Since my phone number was listed on one small site a few years ago, I decided that some of the few visitors for some reason added me to their phone books, and this seemed believable for a while.

But as Telegram grew in popularity, such incomprehensible contacts became more and more, as a result, there were even more of them than people I know. I began to doubt that all these people could add my number to their phone books without ever calling. User names were even more embarrassing - it seemed that the wrong name was used, which the user indicated to himself, but the name under which this user could be recorded in the phone book of a stranger, because specific marks and prefixes were present there.

I contacted one of these contacts, and my fears came true:
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I knew that once a friend of mine worked at UNET. But it was not immediately possible to connect him with these strange contacts. It took some effort to recall a curious moment from the past. About a year ago, my phone suddenly stopped seeing the operator’s network. Everything else worked perfectly, so I assumed that the breakdown was not in the phone, but the SIM card itself, which had been more than 10 years old, was out of order. Just my friend looked in on his visit, and we decided, without any ulterior motives, to test the performance of the phone using its SIM card. The phone turned on, found the network - it became obvious that you need to request a new SIM card from the operator. Another minute - and the SIM card returned to the phone of its owner. The next day, I already had a new SIM card, and I safely forgot that this little inconvenience was the place to be.

And now, a year later, it turns out that there were contacts on that SIM card, and Telegram managed to implicitly save them on its server in a hidden list that it uses to automatically add contacts, and which for some reason is never cleared. All contacts that Telegram could reach at least once in the past are included in this list. This is not only about contacts in the phone book. With equal success, he remembers those who were once added to your Skype (and apparently someone had a phone number there), and even if you deleted this user on Skype a long time ago, Telegram still keeps this information in itself, and automatically add this user to your contacts when he joins the Telegram.

One would have thought that the synchronization of Google contacts could be nagging, but no. Google keeps its contact list and does not arbitrarily “steal” them from other sources. But just in case, I checked if Google had not copied the contacts from my friend's SIM card to me - no, there are only contacts that I personally added.

A small survey showed that several acquaintances encountered a similar problem. The most frequent scenario is that someone allowed his comrade on his smartphone to log in with his Google account for some purpose. After that, of course, this account was removed from the smartphone - but Telegram remembered other people's contacts forever, and began to annoy someone who had once shared his smartphone with automatic addition of unknown people to contacts.

Among my acquaintances, there are Telegram fans who protect any decision made by the developers, and they, among other things, began to protect such unexpected behavior of this messenger. However, I fundamentally disagree. This zealous collection of contacts can lead to very unpleasant consequences. For example, maybe you would not want someone to find out that you have some specific number in your phone book. Or to some number you can specify some extravagant name, which is not at all for prying eyes. In my opinion, this mechanism should be reworked in such a way as to notify and automatically add to Telegram contacts only those people who are in your phone book at the moment, without any shadow or eternal lists.

In addition to the Telegram, I also have Viber installed, and he also announces that someone from the phone book has joined. But at the same time, he does not “remember” the contacts that appeared on this phone by chance a year ago. This mechanism should work in a similar way in Telegram.

TL; DR

Telegram scans all your contacts on your smartphone in order to automatically find the corresponding Telegram contacts, and there is nothing unexpected in this. Undesirable behavior is that it keeps a hidden list of all phone numbers and related names on your devices, and never clears it. This list is used to automatically add newly arrived Telegram users to your contacts. If you once used a friend's SIM card on which some phone numbers were stored, or allowed a friend to temporarily add his Google account to your smartphone - Telegram will remember your friends ’contact lists forever and even after a year will automatically add newly arrived strangers people.

The proposed solution is to use Telegram's auto-add contacts mechanism exclusively for actual phone numbers that are currently available on user devices with active Telegram sessions.

Vote for solving this problem!

I did not find a separate Telegram bugtracker as a whole, so I created a ticket in the buggy tracker of the desktop version of Telegram, but it was closed, because the problem was not in the desktop client. But you can recall this problem to Pavel Durov and the Telegram team via Twitter. Also, desktop client developers recommend reporting problems through the Settings → Support → Ask a question function in a mobile application. Your complaint will be read by a volunteer who can (if he considers it significant enough) send this information to the Telegram developers. The more people pay attention to the problem and express discontent, the sooner it will be resolved.

Below is the survey. I recommend to look into your Telegram contacts (Menu → Contacts, not a chat list) and check if there are any people unknown to you. It is possible that in the past you carelessly merged someone else's contacts into your Telegram, and did not even pay attention to it. If you do not use Telegram - just click on the button "abstain".