Share Only Certain Contact Details

How to Only Share Certain Contact Details with a Private Me Card on macOS

Sharing your contact information from macOS is fast and easy, but if you use your Mac for personal productivity as well as work, you might have sensitive information you don’t want others to see. How do you avoid this?

For example, your contact card may have your home address and private email, which you don’t always want to share. With some people, you may just want to share the pertinent details like your work email address and telephone number.

The answer is to create a “private me” card in Contacts. To do this, open Preferences from the Contacts menu or press Command+, on your keyboard.

Head to the vCard tab, and click “Enable private me card”. You can then exit out of the Preferences.



Now, find your personal contact card. It will be the one with the tiny silhouette next to it.

If you have a lot of contacts and want to instantly go to your card, click the “Card” menu and then “Go to My Card” or press Shift+Command+M on your keyboard.



From there, click the “Edit” button at the bottom of the application.

Once you’re in your card’s details, you will see there are checkboxes next to each of your contact’s specifics. Uncheck everything you don’t want to share in your private me card, then click “Done”.



You share your personal contact with something called a vCard. A vCard is the standard file format for electronic business cards and can contain a lot of information. When someone shares a vCard with you, you can import it into your computer’s contacts so you don’t have to enter the information by hand.



You can share your vCard by selecting your contact and then clicking the Share feature at the bottom of the application window.



Then you can share your card, whether it’s through Mail, Messages, Notes, or other method.



Alternatively, you can click and drag your vCard out of the Contacts application to another destination, such as your desktop, Dropbox folder, or an empty email message.



As long as that Private Me feature is enabled, your private contact card will be distributed with little worry about divulging any sensitive or revealing details.


Just the facts, ma’am!

Networking and getting your name out there is good, but doing so with an eye on privacy is better. There’s little reason why anyone other than your closest friends and family members needs to know more about you than the barest essentials.