How do I not share my contacts with family memebers?

Question

I need HELP! I recently update all three of our phones with ios5 and icloud. I was using mobile me before and had and apple id already. All three devices were under the same apple id and I could view them on the same mobile me account, but each phone was seperate in the fact that we each had our own contacts. Now with the new ios5 and icloud we all have the same contacts which is everyone's combined on each phone. So I logged in to icloud and created seperate folders and put each person contacts from the main list into each person's folder I created thinking I could then delete the all contacts folder but if you do that it deletes the contact all together from all lists. I need help! What can I do to get each person's contacts back to their own phones and not have all contacts on each phone that are not needed? Please break it down step by step if you know how I can fix this whether it is turning off icloud on two devices and erasing what they have already duimped on there and creating a new apple id for each of their phones but then how can I get their contacts back on thier phone? so LOST!

Answer 1

simplest answer i can think of off the top of my head would be to turn off the contacts portion of your icloud(on the device) and use your computer  to create the three contacts folders and likewise synchronize them with their respective devices
.to do so you will need to create "groups" in the program you use to store your contacts. i.e. google mail account. windows addressbook. outlook 2007 or 2010. or mac addressbook.
if you dont store them on an external program i suggest you put this on hold and do so immediately.......
ok so now that your contacts are secure on another program and your contacts are separated into groups(i like to have a shared group including the family contacts that i choose to put on each phone).
you will then need to connect your device to your computer via usb.
once your device is recognized by itunes and appears in the source list(the column on the left hand side)under devices. simply click on it.  this will bring you to your synchronization interface.
at the top of this page you will see a list of tabs i.e. summary, info, apps etc.
1)go to the info tab.
2)place a checkmark in the "sync contacts with or sync addressbook contacts " checkbox.
3) choose your program from the dropdown menu
4)change the bullet point (the dot in the circle) from" all contacts" to "selected groups"
5) select the groups you want on the device which is currently connected.
6)click the apply button in the bottom righthand corner of the itunes window
sorry i dont have a better answer for you but the service is quite new so i havent had much time to troubleshoot its failures. hope this helps