It's discussed in their blog, actually -- others have made this point. It sounds like the "manage contacts" permission is necessary to access the contacts list, which is necessary to bootstrap something like this. (One of Wave's killer flaws was its lack of integration with a real social network.) They claim that they aren't even storing a copy of the list; whether you trust in that or not, I can't say.
Refactoring things to make this optional (which I suspect will disable a feature or two) is reportedly on their roadmap, but they want to tackle it as part of generally refactoring the social-network integration. They've done some polling about it, and it squicks enough people that they are planning to deal with it, though.
Unfortunately, Google+ has the same permissions-granting model that is becoming so common nowadays, where you have to agree to a bundle of poorly-titled permissions in order to do anything interesting. They could really use some transparency there, and maybe some finer-grained permissions. What Rizzoma wants, it sounds like, is mainly read access, but it sounds like the properly tight permission isn't available yet...
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Date: 2012-04-12 07:00 pm (UTC)Refactoring things to make this optional (which I suspect will disable a feature or two) is reportedly on their roadmap, but they want to tackle it as part of generally refactoring the social-network integration. They've done some polling about it, and it squicks enough people that they are planning to deal with it, though.
Unfortunately, Google+ has the same permissions-granting model that is becoming so common nowadays, where you have to agree to a bundle of poorly-titled permissions in order to do anything interesting. They could really use some transparency there, and maybe some finer-grained permissions. What Rizzoma wants, it sounds like, is mainly read access, but it sounds like the properly tight permission isn't available yet...