iOS 5 Allows For “Related People” Contacts Linking

It looks like in another iOS 5 discovery, you can now link contacts with each other by who they are related to. Back in the day you could create groups for your contacts and pretty much everyone was grouped in “Friends” or “Family” or “Work”, not exactly the most creative but it was a way to organize your contacts.

iOS 5 has taken it a couple of steps further and seems to be following in the footsteps of Facebook by allowing you to add related people to contacts, much like how on Facebook you can add your contacts into Parents, Cousins, Siblings, etc. Basically you select the “Related People” button and then from there you can choose from a list such as mother, father, parent, brother, sister, child, friend, spouse, partner, assistant, manager and etc, and it looks like custom labels are also allowed, so if you can further relate your contacts to each other.

However if you’re paranoid of having too much information about you floating on the web then perhaps this is not a feature for you. It could be possible that all this information will be floating up in Apple’s iCloud when you synch your device with it, and if ever iCloud got hacked like Sony’s PSN then everyone will know who’s your brother, your uncle, your boss, etc.

Let’s hope that this feature will be used for good, allowing for easier emailing by allowing to send mass emails to “Family” or “Work” and etc. As it stands the “Related People” button is not compulsory when adding a contact so if you’re not comfortable sharing such information, you don’t have to.