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533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

businessinsider.com

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Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#451

Post by InternetUser »

varispeed wrote: post #319
dan-robertson wrote: post #100

Obviously it is bad if your personal data is compromised after you (or some else) upload it to an online service like Facebook. But in this case, it’s important to remember that phone companies used to regularly leak most of their customer’s phone numbers (and names) in the form of a telephone directory. So a question to consider is: suppose that the white pages were still commonly produced and contained most people’…

You can't compare that at all! They leaked IDs and from that you can go to user profile and learn more about them. You cannot do that from a phone company leak.

Before the Internet, all you could do with a person's phone number is call them. But now, with PeopleSearchNow.com (the ultimate free source of personal info--feel free to look up your own real phone number in it, assuming you're American) and with Google and the MULTIPLE social networks that virtually everyone between the ages of 20 and 45 has been on now--typically using the same username on most or all of them--you can find out way more in a matter of a few MINUTES than a 1980s private investigator ever could in a span of a month. I can look up your number on PeopleSearchNow and then, if I can't find YOU on Facebook, I'm confident I can find one of your relatives (several of whom will be listed on PeopleSearchNow), and get to you from there--meaning find your other online profiles, thanks to those Facebook friends who know you.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#452

Post by djhn »

dudul wrote: post #108
dan-robertson wrote: post #100

Obviously it is bad if your personal data is compromised after you (or some else) upload it to an online service like Facebook. But in this case, it’s important to remember that phone companies used to regularly leak most of their customer’s phone numbers (and names) in the form of a telephone directory. So a question to consider is: suppose that the white pages were still commonly produced and contained most people’…

As far as I can remember, the white pages don't include "biographical information". The kind of details used for idiotic "security questions" on websites too lazy to implement 2FA (your mom's maiden name, your first school, the name of your first pet, etc). As for public tax returns in Scandinavia, first of all it has guardrails - searches are recorded with your information when you lookup someone - and second, count…

Finnish income for those earning 100k and over is bulk downloadable as a csv/json with full names, birth years and provinces, along with taxable salary, capital gains, etc.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#453

Post by InternetUser »

dan-robertson wrote: post #340
varispeed wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare that at all! They leaked IDs and from that you can go to user profile and learn more about them. You cannot do that from a phone company leak.

Phone companies didn’t leak phone numbers in the conventional sense of the word. I used it to try to draw a comparison. Phone numbers used to be printed in big books and you could usually look someone’s phone number up if you knew their name and rough location. That is, phone numbers were not considered to be particularly private information at all. I think the comments I most agree with talk about the different secu…

The issue of having someone's phone number is completely different these days; in 1985, I couldn't find out your age and your previous addresses and then find dozens or even hundreds of photographs of you alone and/or with your relatives and friends, as I can now - see my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26687321

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#454

Post by dang »

allworknoplay wrote: post #161
dan-robertson wrote: post #100

Obviously it is bad if your personal data is compromised after you (or some else) upload it to an online service like Facebook. But in this case, it’s important to remember that phone companies used to regularly leak most of their customer’s phone numbers (and names) in the form of a telephone directory. So a question to consider is: suppose that the white pages were still commonly produced and contained most people’…

This is insane. Phone companies published numbers because it was generally considered helpful and the costs of unsolicited calling were relatively high. By the 70s delisting was an option, and by the late 90s it was very common (in the US). The internet made this a no-brainer, and to suggest that it’s somehow ok just because it used to be (in a totally different world) is beyond ridiculous. We don’t have the option h…

Please make your substantive points without name-calling and swipes. Those are against the site guidelines and we ban accounts that post that way—it's because we're trying for a different fate than internet-default here, or at least to stave it off a while longer.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#455

Post by max_hammer »

b212 wrote: post #328
banana_giraffe wrote: post #272

Looking at the leak others have pointed to, there are a surprising number of people working in a particular imaginary company: sqlite> select company, count(*) as c from usa where length(company) > 0 group by company order by c desc limit 10; company c ---------------------------------------- ---------- Self-Employed 459119 Facebook 181013 Retired 71210 The Krusty Krab 61550 Hollister Co. 42304 U.S. Army 39682 Stay-a…

Could you please tell me how did you convert it to sqlite? I've got a huge 1 GB txt file that crashes my comp every time I try to search for myself there :( Thank you!

You can use `awk` for any sql like operations on file.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#456

Post by [deleted] »

happyhardcore wrote: post #296
OkGoDoIt wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I'm just getting a "Please open Telegram to view this post from @freedomf0x" message. Any way to access this without signing up for Telegram? The irony of giving my personal info to another 3rd party just to check if my personal info was leaked by a different party is too much...

the telegram has a text file with links to links by country, I've just stuck that at https://pastebin.com/3SvG1FJ0

[deleted]

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#457

Post by seng »

mopsi wrote: post #353
ourcat wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought the most scary thing about this practice is that your (unique) phone number is a powerful "foreign key" which could potentially join data from many other leaked databases, forming an even larger dataset on you. There are plently of other places we give our phone numbers to, which might not have anywhere near the protections that Facebook say they provide.

Absolutely, and e-mail or Paypal account name too. Neither of them are trivial to change. If you try to create a new account for each thing at a generic mail provider such as Gmail, your accounts will be shut down by automatic abuse filters. If you roll your own domain, then, well... the domain becomes the foreign key.

Would using a separate service email accounts help mitigate issues? seng-baking@gmail.com, then seng-banking+icici@gmail.com, seng-banking+axis@gmail.com, etc? That way my primary email would stay private and will used only for email, not for identity.

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#459

Post by jand »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #450
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #131

I mean, at this point I think everyone should just accept that at the very least their name, age, address(es), email(s), phone number(s) and screen name(s) have been fully leaked if you have ever had any kind of online presence. Not saying that's right or good, but at this point it's just a fact. So if that's the case, I think we should move beyond really even trying to think of this info as private or a marker of id…

The problem is completely the opposite. The flaw is the existence of social security numbers. Prohibit them from being used for anything but social security. Then there is no "your social security number" or "your identity" for someone to open a bank account against. You open a bank account and they give you a bank card and you set an address and phone number. The day you open it, they shouldn't need to know who you…

I stand by your SSN only for social security point.

But the rest sounds plain wrong to me.

Your phone might get stolen, your name might change due to marriage, your address might change because you moved/got evicted. What now?

Re: 533M Facebook users' phone numbers and personal data have been leaked online

#460

Post by novok »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #450
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #131

I mean, at this point I think everyone should just accept that at the very least their name, age, address(es), email(s), phone number(s) and screen name(s) have been fully leaked if you have ever had any kind of online presence. Not saying that's right or good, but at this point it's just a fact. So if that's the case, I think we should move beyond really even trying to think of this info as private or a marker of id…

The problem is completely the opposite. The flaw is the existence of social security numbers. Prohibit them from being used for anything but social security. Then there is no "your social security number" or "your identity" for someone to open a bank account against. You open a bank account and they give you a bank card and you set an address and phone number. The day you open it, they shouldn't need to know who you…

KYC laws and governments desire to have silent complete financial surveillance stops banks from acting that way too.
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