Why does Roon need access to my Android contacts?

I have just installed Roon Remote on an Android mobile and was informed that, among others, I must consent to give Roon access to my contacts.
May I ask why you need access to my Contacts, what you do with that information and what measures you have taken to ensure that any such information is protected for access only by Roon according to whatever need it is that makes you collect it?

Peter

Here is a more complete description of the issue.

I am running Android 8.1 on a Huawei 20 Pro.

The installation from Google Play states:
Roon Remote needs access to:
Identity
Contacts
Photos/Media/Files
WiFi connection information

The expander for Contacts states:
Uses contact information

I also looked at the privacy statement and cannot reconcile it to this requirement on Android.
Having just completed the European General Data Protection Regulation implementation for my firm, this flashed a yellow caution light.

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In Android 8 (7 might have it as well) you can disable individual permissions for an app.

I tried this on my Pixel C. In Settings->Apps & notifications I selected the Roon app and then Permissions. I turned Contacts off and got a warning that the app is designed for an older version of Android and that it might give issues.I selected Deny anyway. The Roon app still seems to run fine but I have to use it a bit longer with the changed setting.

In Android the required permissions are defined by the app developer and not by Google. So the Roon team should be able to tell why the permission is required or remove it from the permissions list otherwise.

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Hi All,

First–I want to state this clearly: Roon Labs does not fetch, store, use, or access your contacts list in any way.

The reason why the app requests the READ_CONTACTS permission is because Roon uses the name of the logged-in user profile, in order to personalize the name of the device and its zone in a few places. For example, my phone shows up as “Brian’s Pixel XL 2” because we extracted “Brian” from my profile. There are two Pixel XL 2’s in my household, so being able to tell them apart is pretty important!

Unfortunately, Google has bundled access to this piece of data into a needlessly broad permission category that includes the full contact list.

We have looked into this in the past–back in 2015 we tried to remove this permission (because it appeared unnecessary to us at the time) and discovered that it broke the above mentioned functionality, so it was put back, and remains in place.

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You can see the mechanism we use and the permissions required noted here:

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Great, Jan.
I had seen notification but not Permissions - I am new to Android.
Several other Apps had odd permissions.
I also note that access to Contacts is not automatic for all free Apps - Roon was the only one. That suggests that Roon can control this access.
Peter

Brian, Danny.
That makes sense: Android wants to minimise the number of categories and Roon wants a friendly identifier.
Thank you.
Case closed!
Peter

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