Why does LiveTrack require me to give access to ALL of my contacts?

The response from Garmin Support... still doesn't explain why it was necessary. And iOS has no way to give access to "some contacts" but not all, so I'm not sure I buy their comment about only some contacts are uploaded...

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.

At least Garmin did not suggest you do a factory reset of the watch or send it in for replacement. ;-)

Uploading all contacts to Garmin servers - could actually be a breach of EU GDPR regulations. So I do not know why Garmin is doing it. 

To upload your friends details - you should have each ones active permission according to GDPR.

WhatsApp/FB etc are in the search lights of the EU commission for exactly that practice. 

One can discuss if GDPR is good or not - but as it stands that is what is the legal requirement. 

interesting I did not know that about GDPR!

Maybe I just see things differently but this:

renschler said:

only includes those contacts you select to import from your phone or that you manually create within Garmin Connect

seems to imply only selected contacts. 

How do you interpret that as all of them?

Yea they should update the app so that it uses that wording (which was the explanation provided after the fact by the support team). The app itself just says "Our new Contacts feature can securely store your contact list in our servers..."

iOS does not support the ability to selectively give access to some contacts, so once you give Garmin Connect access to your contacts they can see everything. It's true that they might not upload your full contact list, but it seems unnecessary for Full Contact List access to be required in order to use the LiveTrack feature.

I’d suggest reading the whole sentence before defending Garmin on this one.

”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 ...”

So the contact information “stored in Garmin Connect” only includes a subset of contacts.  But that doesn’t mean all contacts aren’t uploaded and/or stored somewhere else.

psling23 said:

But that doesn’t mean all contacts aren’t uploaded and/or stored somewhere else.

Nor does it mean that they are.

I'm not defending Garmin. Just suggesting that perhaps not all contacts are uploaded. I understand some people get 'excited' about these things. I'm one of those people who don't. 

To that end, if there are elements of the feature that any individual doesn't like, then it's easy to simply avoid using the feature. In the meantime, concerned individuals need to lobby both iOS and Garmin to effect the necessary changes so that it becomes usable to them.

Dr Phil said:

it's easy to simply avoid using the feature

If this was a new feature I'd be less fired up but LiveTrack has been around for years... it used to work without giving Garmin full access to your contacts, you just had to enter a phone number or email of an emergency contact... It's not clear why that needed to change.