Can users of Salesforce "Customer Communities" update their own Contact object?
This Salesforce help page implies that they can:
Salesforce – Communities User Licenses
This great diagram by Steven Herod implies that they only have Read-only access to their own contact record:
LimitException – Salesforce Standard Object Access by Community or Portal license type
Which is correct?
Best Answer
Today, Customer Community users can edit their contact record if you setup sharing sets to give them this capability. The problem is the out of the box UI doesn't expose the contact to the user. You can expose via Visualforce. In the Spring '14 release Salesforce removes this restriction and the out of the box UI will now show both the Contact tab and record.