I am very disappointed in the changes Garmin has made to the Farmin Connect App. In order to continue use the Livetrack feature you have to sign over the access to all your contacts. This is nothing sort of a bulling data grab and Garmin should be assamed of this new policy.
I completely agree. Very, very, disappointing. Specifically since the service is paid by the customers. At least I hope it is the case, and that Garmin doesn't sell our data without our knowledge.
I use LiveTrack with e-mail addresses that are not in my address book, so currently it is not needed for the functionality itself. Why force user to give access to their full address book? Why store my contacts on the Garmin servers? The act of blocking access to LiveTrack if you don't provide full access to your address book gives me a bad feeling.
"Our new Contacts feature can securely store your contact list on our servers" - What is the reason to store my contact list on your servers and not access it directly on my phone? - Garmin the first company in the world that cannot be hacked? The Garmin servers; a one stop shop for hackers. Don't hack individual devices, but go to the Garmin supermarket to get all your data in one time.
"Without Contacts, these features will be disabled" - Why? LiveTrack works fine with only an e-mail address. Why does LiveTrack need name, phone number and other details? For many contacts I even don't have an e-mail. Is. LiveTrack planning to make phone calls or send postal mail to LiveTrack users :(
I don't have a problem with the functionality itself, but don't block the usage of LiveTrack for users who want to enter the e-mails manually like I did.
It’s been possible to use LiveTrack using just an email address in the past, so this isn’t enabling any new feature. So, what’s the reason Garmin suddenly want access to our contacts?
In the absence of any functional requirement or explanation, it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that they want to do something with our data that they think we’ll object to if they told us.
As for the questions regarding the contacts within the Garmin Connect App, with the announcement of the vivoactive 3 Music (Verizon) at CES 2019, we introduced Incident Detection and LiveTrack to wrist-worn devices along with a new Assistance feature. As part of our efforts to introduce this new functionality and allow the vivoactive 3 Music (Verizon) to use contact information for those features and phone-free text messaging, we re-examined how we handle contacts for all users and decided to make changes to better allow users to use contacts across features like LiveTrack and Incident Detection. Doing so also paves the way for future enhancements and functionality. The contact information is stored in Garmin Connect solely for the purpose of supporting these features and only includes those contacts you select to import from your phone or that you manually create within Garmin Connect.
