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Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

partofthething.com

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Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#11

Post by jeeva »

lorenzhs wrote: post #8
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #5

> I’m trying to learn ways to minimize my reliance upon large companies for handling my day-to-day personal data. Except that the moment you "share them across devices", at least one large company will silently grab your contacts anyway. And several others will try to, too, with one excuse or another.

Why would anyone get your contacts if you sync them via your own CarDav server? You don't need to sync them to iCloud / Siri on iOS, and you can use non-Google Android phones.

As a few examples, there are a variety of social-network applications (LinkedIn, Facebook) that request access to your platform specific contacts application. They then do a variety of interesting things with them, such as suggesting users with numbers they have "on file" as potential new "Friends", etc. This is seemingly server-side.

Whatever you're using to sync contacts, without syncing them to this contact app, it seems (to me) as useful as keeping a textfile full of phone numbers in Dropbox. You won't have any useful prompts telling you that it's Dave phoning you, John texting you, or Alice's number to phone/text.

This is, admittedly, neatly worked around by keeping your permission requests under control, but... stuff like this[1], from before the granular permission system on Android was available, are annoying.

1: http://bgr.com/2011/08/12/facebook-stole-every-contact-and-p...

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#14

Post by Rjevski »

opinsky wrote: post #12

How would it work for email invitations automatically being added as calendar entries?

No open-source calendar server that I know of supports this - they all rely on your email client managing this client-side (when you accept an invitation it adds it to your calendar).

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#15

Post by synchrone »

opinsky wrote: post #12

How would it work for email invitations automatically being added as calendar entries?

There is a message-based interoperability protocol for iCalendar: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc5546/ and https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc6047/.

This is what Google Mail + Calendar are using, including features like RSVP, etc. It's all there, just passing iCal objects around.

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#16

Post by toadkicker »

Nux wrote: post #3

People looking for easier ways, Nextcloud/Owncloud already does this and you also get with file sync/backup/share for computer/smartphone and more as a bonus; all you need is just a LAMP server.

I use http://mailinabox.email which totally automates running your own mail server. Highly recommend taking a look at it!

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#17

Post by octopoc »

Nux wrote: post #3

People looking for easier ways, Nextcloud/Owncloud already does this and you also get with file sync/backup/share for computer/smartphone and more as a bonus; all you need is just a LAMP server.

I have about 1TB of data that I tried to sync with NextCloud. The Windows client crashed every night, so I finally gave up and moved to Syncthing. Has anybody else had a similar experience?

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#18

Post by balladeer »

znpy wrote: post #10
Nux wrote: post #3

People looking for easier ways, Nextcloud/Owncloud already does this and you also get with file sync/backup/share for computer/smartphone and more as a bonus; all you need is just a LAMP server.

I am commenting to confirm that nextcloud works very very well. I am running the official docker image with an apache2 frontend (http/https) and it pretty much works flawlessly.

They don't offer client side encryption yet, do they?

Just checked the GH issue and it is still open: https://github.com/owncloud/client/issues/4327 and https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/5145

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#19

Post by acidburnNSA »

Nux wrote: post #3

People looking for easier ways, Nextcloud/Owncloud already does this and you also get with file sync/backup/share for computer/smartphone and more as a bonus; all you need is just a LAMP server.

This is a reasonable recommendation, aligned with the summary of the article.

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#20

Post by lorenzhs »

jeeva wrote: post #11
lorenzhs wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone get your contacts if you sync them via your own CarDav server? You don't need to sync them to iCloud / Siri on iOS, and you can use non-Google Android phones.

As a few examples, there are a variety of social-network applications (LinkedIn, Facebook) that request access to your platform specific contacts application. They then do a variety of interesting things with them, such as suggesting users with numbers they have "on file" as potential new "Friends", etc. This is seemingly server-side. Whatever you're using to sync contacts, without syncing them to this contact app, i…

That's not an automatism nor inevitable, though. I don't have either of these apps on my phone. And both iOS and now Android have these dynamic permission dialogs where you can refuse access to your contacts. It may be inconvenient to use a messaging app without granting it access to your contacts, but I think all of them work that way on iOS. Refusing to work without access would be against the iOS guidelines iirc.

But that wasn't the article's concern at all, as you pointed out in another comment.

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