It only works if both people participate. You’ll only be matched with someone if you both have each other in your contacts and you’ve both opted into Find Friends. If you never use this feature, you’ll never be findable through it. Your coworker can’t use it to look you up unless you’ve uploaded their number from your contacts.
You verify your number first. Before any matching happens, you prove that you own your phone number. This prevents bad actors from uploading random numbers to fish for information about who’s on Bluesky.
Your contact data is protected even if something goes wrong. We store phone numbers as hashed pairs — your number combined with each contact’s number — which makes the data exponentially harder to reverse-engineer. That encryption is also tied to a hardware security key stored separately from our database.
You can remove your data anytime. Changed your mind? You can delete your uploaded contacts and opt out entirely.