I'm using the Google People API to access my contacts.
I activated it in the Google Developers Console and created a project, a service account (ending with ....iam.gserviceaccount.com) and a key for authentication which is stored in JSON format.
When I access the contacts, it seems to take the contacts of my service account address rather than my Google account which results in an empty list.
How can I tell the API to use my account rather than the service account?
This is the code I have so far:
from google.oauth2 import service_account
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
# pip install google-auth google-auth-httplib2 google-api-python-client
SCOPES = ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.readonly']
KEY = '~/private.json'
credentials = service_account.Credentials.from_service_account_file(
KEY, scopes=SCOPES)
service = build(
serviceName='people', version='v1', credentials=credentials)
connections = service.people().connections().list(
resourceName='people/me', personFields='names').execute()
print(connections)
# result: {}
A service account is NOT you a service account is a dummy user it has its own google drive account, google calendar and apparently google contacts. The reason that you are seeing an empty result set is that you have not added any contacts to the service accounts account.
Service accounts are most often used to grant access to data that the developer owns. For example you can take the service account email address and share one of your folders on google drive it will then have acccess to that folder on your google drive account. You can do the same with google calendar.
There are some apis that do not give you the ablity to share your data with other users. Youtube, adwords, blogger and google contacts to name a few.
You cant use a service account to access your personal google contacts. Your best bet would be to authenticate your application with oauth2 and access them that way.
If you have a google workspace account, a serivce account can be configured to act on behalf of a user on the domain, but only a user on the domain. Perform Google Workspace domain-wide delegation of authority