google grabs phone contacts

[hi535]

this may may be wrong forum but i'll start here.

i notice on my google email account web interface under "contacts" all my phone contacts from my cell phone are there. i just noticed this as it wasn't an issue with blackberry.

is there a way to not have google auto grab so much data from my phone and put it on my google web account?

[GLW163]

This a feature most people like. If you ever get a new android phone you just log in with your gmail account and all you contacts will load onto that phone. If you want to turn off contact syning. Open contacts, click on menu button bottom left, click on accounts. then click on google and uncheck sync contacts.

[hi535]

we do the same with copying over a sim card/sd card to the new android phone too, yes?

appreciate the info on sync'ing contacts

[Ann154]

You could copy the contacts to the SD card. Unfortunately not all android phones have a SD card slot and rely on the internal storage only.

The SIM card may or may not have enough space to store the contacts.

IMHO having the contacts including phone contacts in the Gmail account is faster and simpler. I can sync my contact information between three different android devices and any changes made on one update to the other two the next time they sync with the cloud.

[hi535]

i will agree it is faster and simpler.

i just have a few issues with google and its constant profiling of account data.

[demmo86rt]

Your phone is tied into your gmail account, you should have noticed this when you first activated the phone.  They are saving your contacts as just that... contacts.  That being said, any time you input a new contact you can choose to save them as gmail contacts or phone contacts.  Anything saved as a phone contact will not be backed up to your gmail account.

[Ann154]

demmo86rt wrote:

Your phone is tied into your gmail account, you should have noticed this when you first activated the phone.  They are saving your contacts as just that... contacts.  That being said, any time you input a new contact you can choose to save them as gmail contacts or phone contacts.  Anything saved as a phone contact will not be backed up to your gmail account.

Very weird. I can't see this reply on the mobile site, but it quite visible on the desktop.

If one is willing to deal with the extra time to save the contacts as a phone only contact and then manually transfer them between devices, I guess that is their choice for phone management.

[demmo86rt]

That is weird.  And I agree.  In fact, my wife has run into this problem a couple times doing factory resets and a group of her contacts didn't restore because they were saved as phone only.  More hassle than it's worth.