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Furbol — How It Works

Phone Contacts

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Phone Contacts

Furbol uses your phone’s address book to find people you already know. Someone you’ve got a phone number for turns up as a contact if they’re on Furbol; if they’re not, you can invite them. And the same thing works in reverse — people who have your number can find you, unless you’ve turned the toggle that lets them do that off.

It works both ways

The matching is symmetric:

  • Your contacts are people whose numbers you have in your phone who are also on Furbol. They show up in your Contacts tab (in the home screen drawer, or the “Contacts: (N)” row in the side menu).
  • The other way round — people who have your number and are on Furbol. Before you’ve let Furbol read your phone book, they show up as silhouettes on the onboarding contacts step, with a count like “you may find X people you know by syncing”. You can tell they’re there but not who they are.

Matching on its own doesn’t make a connection — that only happens once both sides have matched. See the connections page for the mutual-match rule.

What actually leaves your phone

When you grant Furbol permission to read your contacts, it reads the phone numbers in your address book and compares them against its users.

Two things worth knowing:

  • Names and other fields don’t get uploaded. Only phone numbers are used for the match — not your contacts’ names, emails, birthdays, or anything else you might’ve saved.
  • Numbers are scrambled before leaving your phone whenever possible, so your raw list isn’t sent as-is. The app handles how; you don’t have to choose.

The Contacts tab

In the home-screen drawer, the Contacts tab lists everyone in your phone book who’s on Furbol. At the top there’s a Sync contacts button — tap it to re-read your phone book and refresh the list after you’ve saved someone new.

Each matched contact shows up as a full profile row with a Follow button right on it, so you can go from “oh, Alice is on here” to following her in a single tap.

People who’ve already turned up through other paths (you added them in-app, redeemed a share link from them, got a game invitation from them) don’t show up twice. And being in your Contacts tab and following someone are separate things — people you already follow still appear in the tab.

Silhouettes during signup

During signup, the contacts step goes one of two ways:

  • You give Furbol permission. Furbol runs the sync right there and shows your matches as real profiles you can tap and follow. Those are your starting connections.
  • You skip. Furbol shows you a row of silhouette avatars instead — Furbol users who have your number saved in their phones. You see a count (“you may find X people you know by syncing”) but no names, no faces.

The silhouettes are a nudge, not a privacy gap: you can’t tap through them to identities, and no name leaks. The only action at that step is “give permission, or skip.”

The “phone contacts can find me” toggle

In the account editor under Preferences, there’s a toggle called Phone contacts can find me (also on Profile Privacy). It’s on by default.

Flipping it off makes you stop appearing in other people’s Contacts tabs unless you’ve added them first:

  • Toggle on (the default): anyone who has your number can see you in their Contacts tab.
  • Toggle off: only people you’ve saved in your phone can see you via contact-matching.

This is the way to disappear from contact-matching without leaving Furbol. Players who know you through games, follows, venues, or links you’ve shared can still reach you — this toggle only affects phone-contact discovery.

What matching doesn’t do

  • It doesn’t make you follow someone. A match just means “both of you are on Furbol, and one of you has the other’s number.” Following is a separate, deliberate tap.
  • It doesn’t notify the other side. Someone becoming your contact doesn’t get a push about it — they’ll just see you in their Contacts tab the next time they sync.
  • It doesn’t reveal your phone number. Neither person sees the other’s number through the match.

Re-syncing: additive, not a mirror

The Sync contacts button on the Contacts tab is manual by design — Furbol doesn’t re-read your phone book in the background. Tap it whenever you want to pick up people you’ve newly saved in your phone.

The important thing to know: a re-sync adds, it doesn’t replace. Each time you sync, Furbol picks up any new numbers in your phone and adds the matches to your Contacts tab. Numbers that used to be there but aren’t anymore — someone whose contact card you deleted from your phone between syncs — stay in your Furbol contact list. There’s no “this person is no longer in my phone book, please remove them” step.

The practical consequences:

  • Re-syncing is safe and cumulative. Tapping Sync contacts never shrinks your list; worst case, nothing new matches and the list is the same length.
  • Deleting someone from your phone doesn’t hide them from Furbol. If you want to stop seeing a particular person in your Contacts tab — for example, because you blacklisted them — that’s a separate action on their profile, not something re-sync can reverse.
  • Switching phones keeps what you’ve synced before. Your Contacts tab carries over to the new phone; the first sync on a new device picks up anything the old phone missed but doesn’t drop anything the old phone had.