screen sharing suggests contacts list

I am guessing there is a bug here. I have same issue. Names of people I have not had contact with in years appear in the Screen Sharing box that pops up on my screen when start to type an ip address. When I clear out the recents lists all my servers disappear, but just the names still show up. I don't even know how they got there, and seems impossible to get rid of them other than wiping my system/userid and starting fro scratch.

I have poked around, looked at plist, turned of Siri, etc. No luck.

Can go to support but want to report here as well so more people join in if they are having the same issue.

Hi there Spawnreaper,

It sounds like what you're seeing are Siri suggestions for your contacts. You can turn those off in the Apple menu () > System Settings, then click Siri & Spotlight, and deselect your screen sharing app. You'll find more information about how that works here: How Siri Suggestions work on Mac - Apple Support

Take care.

OK SOLVED.

Bear with me here:

I don't use Apple's Contacts app on my Mac. But for some reason Apple Contacts scooped up all of my contacts, either from Outlook for mac or Google.

This is perhaps my mistake over the years of using too many of these competitive yet overlapping systems on one platform over the years. To be realistic we all know we have 10,000 different type of communication apps on any one of our devices, and all of them want to scrape the other's data, which just so happens to be our personal data... so that ONE App can rule us, until another similar app comes along, scrapes, repeats. It's the world we have built and live in. And constant vigilance is required to make sure our data stays in the app of our choice (and safe), not the app or platform that chooses to scrape our data and take over either without our permission, or because the choices given are so ambiguous that we end up with "Oops, I did it again." (Things in IT were much simpler in Britney's early career.)

In any case, this is where it gets weird: Why would the screen sharing app on Mac Os start putting the names of my contacts in its list...and then not allow them to be removed?

Best I can say with my noob knowledge is "It's a temporary April Fools day feature." OK OK "It's a bug."

In any case, I found the workaround/fix: Delete all contacts from the Apple Contacts app.

And since I don't use Apple Contacts, no problem for me. However I need to be vigilant to be sure Contacts does not try to scrape up my contacts from other locations again (again perhaps my fault in allowing it to do so with all the tinkering I do, aka "Oops I did it again.").

So I am sorry in that I do not have a root cause for this.

But I did find a workaround.

And I am sorry if you have this issue and actually use the Apple Contacts app Because you will still need to figure out why names of your contacts pop up on your Screen Sharing list. Perhaps if it is the name of your Grandmother, a Windows 95 machine will pop up. ;-)

Cheers!

Hans

Hey Spawnreaper,

We suggest reaching out to Apple Support directly for a closer look: Contact - Official Apple Support

Take care.