If Google are going to be so paranoid about contacts, they should have an API which makes them completely opaque. The application, having access to the contacts, means that it can get a list of abstract tokens representing contacts, but not actually peek at their details. For everything imaginable you'd want to do with/to/by-means-of a contact, an API is provided which does it opaquely. Including UI stuff; like displaying a contact to the user.

Properties of a contact coud also be opaquely handled in a UI. Say you access contact.phoneNum. You get some abstract thing that doesn't give you the phone number string. But the object has a token which can be shoved into a UI form, and the UI form's textBox widget (being privileged, trusted code) can get the phone number in order to display it.