# Contacts

Find people, keep private notes about them, and check who you are really talking to.

**Contacts** is your personal address book inside Databeamer. Adding someone is one-sided: they are not notified and do not need to accept.

## Adding a contact

Open **Contacts** and choose **Add contact**. You can search **Public Profiles** (people who chose to be discoverable) and **Organization members** (people in your organisations). Pick the person to add them.

## Private notes

Each contact has an **Only for you** section with a **Nickname**, **Tags** and **Notes**. These are for your eyes only; the contact never sees them.

> **Security details**
> Your contact list is one blob encrypted with ChaCha20-Poly1305 under your identity key; nicknames, tags and notes exist only inside it. The server sees that the blob changed, not what is in it.

From a contact you can start a **Message**, a **Secure Mail** or a **Transfer** straight away.

## Checking identities

Databeamer has no codes to compare by hand. Instead, whenever you select a person as a recipient, a **Confirm current identity** panel shows:

- their organisation memberships,
- groups you have in common,
- how long they have been a member,
- an **Identity verified by Databeamer** badge, if they have one.

People can also add **self-declared labels** to their profile. Those are what they say about themselves and are not checked by anyone.

> **Security details**
> The **Identity verified by Databeamer** badge is granted by Databeamer staff after a check and is cleared automatically when a checked profile field changes. Public profile data (name, organisations, labels, shared groups, membership date) is plaintext on the server and shown only to users who are allowed to see it. Manual safety numbers are not offered.

## Being found yourself

By default other users cannot search for you. Turn on **Public profile** under **Settings › Account** to let other Databeamer users find you by name or email.

## Removing a contact

Removing a contact only edits your own list. They are not notified and nothing you shared with them changes.