> "Riot needs permission to access your address book contacts to find other Matrix users based on their email and phone numbers. Please allow access on the next pop-up to discover address book users reachable from Riot."
I know very well that concise wording in UIs is incredibly hard, but this wording is misleading. It makes it sound like Riot will not work unless I allow access to the address book. I'd suggest something like this:
> Riot can check your address book to find other Matrix users based on their email and phone numbers. If you agree to sharing your address book for this purpose, please allow access on the next pop-up.
I definitely agree that your wording change is a big improvement.
Why can't Riot "check my address book to find other Matrix users" without sharing it to their server? Could the client make a one-way hash for each contact and send those to the server to compare against hashes of other contacts?
So in your wording, it's not clear that B (agree to sharing my whole address book) follows from A (Riot wants to check my address book for a purpose). Actually it's not clear if "agree to sharing your address book" means sharing it with the client app, or sharing it with a remote server that someone else controls.
I know very well that concise wording in UIs is incredibly hard, but this wording is misleading. It makes it sound like Riot will not work unless I allow access to the address book. I'd suggest something like this:
> Riot can check your address book to find other Matrix users based on their email and phone numbers. If you agree to sharing your address book for this purpose, please allow access on the next pop-up.