While I agree with the sentiment, I am not so sure how well this could be implemented in practice. I feel it would rather be better to disconnect the more stat

While I agree with the sentiment, I am not so sure how well this could be implemented in practice. I feel it would rather be better to disconnect the more static portions of a contact (in this case the phone number) from the contact on the chat network, and use something a bit more transient. Like an email address. And while yes, primary email addresses are even more static to our identity then phone numbers, having the option of using a single address for each chat network would disconnect this contact graph somewhat. Going further, if each platform (iOS/Android) would have a more granular portions of the contact queryable rather than handing over the whole contact, the applications could simply just request the "chat network identity" portion of the contact (never to receive the phone number, country, home address etc etc)