How to prevent dictation from accessing/sending your contacts? I have just read this article about the privacy concerns when using dictation in Mountain Lion. The article points out part of the disclaimer:


  “When you dictate text, what you say is sent to Apple to be converted
  to text. To help your Mac recognize what you’re saying, other
  information is sent as well, such as your contacts.”


The Apple site also states:


  Just say your friend’s name, and Dictation knows who you mean. It
  works with information in the Contacts app to recognize and spell
  names accurately, even if they have unusual spellings.


So I understand that it's not necessarily for nefarious purposes and I'd like to continue to use dictation, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable knowing my contacts' information is being sent away from my computer. 

As far as I've found, there is no way to officially disable the sending of contact information. I'm wondering if it's possible to block/disable dictation from sending my contacts using another method?
This is just a work around and I don't own Mountain Lion yet, so I can't test it myself, but I bet it will work. In all likelihood, each user on a given computer can turn Dictation on or off independent of the other users and Dictation only sends information from whichever user account is currently active.

When I get Mountain Lion, I will set up a second "dummy" user, that will only be used for dictation/transcription. I won't use any user info-based applications (iCal, Address Book, etc.) in this secondary account. When I want to dictate something, I'll use the handy fast user switching command to jump over to my dummy account (also copying over any needed information or documents pertinent to the dictation), dictate the content, and when it comes back from Apple I'll copy the transcription back to my main account. Hypothetically, then, the only info Apple will get from me will be fairly standard hardware/OS stats, my Apple ID (which they, of course, already have), and the contents of the dictation/transcription.