AAPL Company

Apple builds social graph: iOS 5 lets you add 'Related People' to Contacts

9to5 Staff | Jun 10 2011 - 8:04 am PT

Another interesting discovery related to the Contacts app in iOS 5. You can now, if you want, add ‘related people’ to your contact cards. The Related People field is disabled by default so you add it first by tapping the Add Field option in the contact card editing interface. Choosing Related People at the bottom lets you pick among a dozen pre-populated labels such as mother, father, parent, brother, sister, child, friend, spouse, partner, assistant, manager and other.

You can also add a custom label if you want (i.e. frenemy or boss) or define a URL. When you pick the desired labels for a contact card, simply type in the name of a related person or hit the blue arrow button to choose from your existing contacts. This looks like a nice-to-have, but it could be way more than that. Here’s the worst case scenario…

Considering you can also add people’s social profiles in Contacts for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Flickr, it appears that Apple could be building your social graph. And once all of this stuff syncs with your iCloud account, Apple will know how everyone is related.

That may not be such a bad thing if it helps find you addresses quickly in email for instance. On the downside, this would be a great attack vector for a virus. Theoretically speaking, a virus could go into your relationships and your friends’ social networking profiles and craft some smart social engineering tricks in emails or instant communications, fooling everyone. Spooky stuff…