Contact Permissions

Control who can see a contact's details, understand masked contact information, and request access in the CRM.

Every CRM contact carries its own permissions. What a user sees when they open a contact depends on the sharing grants on that record — and unlike most PEARS modules, a contact's email and phone numbers are hidden from users who have not been granted access.

TIP: Partners use the same sharing model with a wider default preview.

Access Tiers

Tier	What the user sees	How it's granted
Minimal	Only the contact's Name, Organization, City, State, and Record Owner. Email and phone numbers are masked. Interactions the user doesn't have access to are hidden.	The floor — every user in your organization holds at least this much.
View	The full contact record, read-only.	A sharing grant with View Only access that reaches the user.
Edit	The full record, with the ability to change it.	A sharing grant with View & Edit access, or being the record's owner, the owner's supervisor, a Data Manager, or an Organization Administrator.

Masked Values

Contact details are masked on the server, not merely hidden in the interface — a masked value is never sent to the browser and never appears in an export.

Field	Masked as
Email address	*****@*****
Phone number	(***) ***-****
Private interaction notes	(private note)

NOTE: A mask and a blank field are deliberately different. A masked value tells you the contact has an email address you cannot see; a blank tells you there isn't one on record.

Anyone Can Log an Interaction

A user at the Minimal tier can still log an interaction with the contact, even though they cannot see the contact's details. This is intentional — recording that an engagement happened should never require access to someone's personal information.

Demographics Are Manager-Only

A contact's demographics — gender, age, race, and ethnicity — are not governed by the access tiers. They are visible and editable only to the record's owner, the owner's supervisors, Data Managers, and Organization Administrators, regardless of any sharing grant.

The Baseline Grant

When a contact's General Information is saved, PEARS creates the record's first sharing grant automatically, targeting the owner's unit. Everyone in that unit and the units beneath it gets View Only access.

Every later share adds another grant, and access is the union of every grant that reaches a user.

TIP: Contacts no longer collect a Unit field of their own, which is why the baseline grant follows the record owner's unit instead.

Share a Contact

1

Open the Permissions section

From the contact record, click Permissions in the progress panel.

2

Add a share

Under Shared with, add a grant and choose what it targets — a Person, a Unit and everything beneath it, or your whole Organization.

Screenshot: The Grant access dialog with the Share with tiles A unit and A user, the Unit picker, the Access Level tiles View only and View & edit, and the Add button

3

Choose the access level

Set the grant to View Only or View & Edit.

NOTE: Managing sharing grants is limited to the record's owner, the owner's supervisors, Data Managers, and Organization Administrators. A user with View & Edit can change the contact's details but cannot re-share the record.

Request Access

A user at the Minimal tier sees a Request access button on the contact.

1

Choose the access you need

Select View Only or View & Edit.

2

Add a reason (optional)

Explain why you need access. The reason is shown to the record owner.

3

Submit

PEARS emails the record owner, and the request appears on the contact as Pending.

The owner can Approve the request — creating a grant at the level requested — or Deny it. A user can have only one open request per contact at a time.

Interaction Privacy

Each interaction also carries its own audience, set by Who can view this interaction? when it is logged. See Create an Interaction.

Related Documentation

• Partner Permissions — The same model applied to partner records.

• Contact Demographics — The manager-only demographics section.

• Editable Users — How supervisor access is determined.