101–110 of 177 posts
They have these already, it’s called a Yellow Pages. It was opt out for a fee. They shipped internationally. Anyone in the world could get your phone number and it was nigh untraceable! The world did not end because of it. I’d take the freak outs online seriously if anyone seemed to realize they’ve been “compromised” or easily could have been for years. Much more easily in fact, with less paper trail. Increased aware…
You mean white pages :)
I’ve lived in regions where the white and red sections were part of the yellow pages, a separate book, and yellow with black edge markings.
I don’t think phone book experiences are particularly uniform, based on my own having had a lot of variation.
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> If you've ever given the service your number, you should consider your real identity linked to it. I have a feeling it's worse than that. (I haven't rigorously perused the ToS, if I'm wrong please lmk.) Let's say your friend John has an iPhone and saves your name and # in their contacts. One day John installs the Facebook app & opens it. John is not technical and when the app requests permissions he taps 'Allow'. A…
I've also definitely received "friend" suggestions for business contacts who I've had a phone number/email address stored in my phone. There are no mutual friends or any other link it could make apart from linking my contact list with their number.
The bigger the network, the more value a user gets, and the deeper the lock in.
It has been shown over and over again that both Facebook and Google will go to extreme lengths to know about their users’ lives and target them with precision ads. They are advertising companies foremost.
They have these already, it’s called a Yellow Pages. It was opt out for a fee. They shipped internationally. Anyone in the world could get your phone number and it was nigh untraceable! The world did not end because of it. I’d take the freak outs online seriously if anyone seemed to realize they’ve been “compromised” or easily could have been for years. Much more easily in fact, with less paper trail. Increased aware…
White pages worked because there were less bad actors.
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> If you've ever given the service your number, you should consider your real identity linked to it. I have a feeling it's worse than that. (I haven't rigorously perused the ToS, if I'm wrong please lmk.) Let's say your friend John has an iPhone and saves your name and # in their contacts. One day John installs the Facebook app & opens it. John is not technical and when the app requests permissions he taps 'Allow'. A…
Would rather not share the details here, but I know of one instance of a person having been found on Facebook via her phone number even though she never provided it - just one imprudent person who has your number associated with your real full name is enough for this to happen.
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> If you've ever given the service your number, you should consider your real identity linked to it. I have a feeling it's worse than that. (I haven't rigorously perused the ToS, if I'm wrong please lmk.) Let's say your friend John has an iPhone and saves your name and # in their contacts. One day John installs the Facebook app & opens it. John is not technical and when the app requests permissions he taps 'Allow'. A…
Your feeling is correct. It's been shown by researchers (incl. me) and confirmed by Facebook that they're doing that: https://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-giving-advertisers-access-to...
Heads up: when Facebook asks you to give them your phone number to "prevent you getting locked out of your account", they really just want it so they can identify your other profiles in datasets they've bought/own (e.g. WhatsApp). If you've ever given the service your number, you should consider your real identity linked to it.
> If you've ever given the service your number, you should consider your real identity linked to it. I have a feeling it's worse than that. (I haven't rigorously perused the ToS, if I'm wrong please lmk.) Let's say your friend John has an iPhone and saves your name and # in their contacts. One day John installs the Facebook app & opens it. John is not technical and when the app requests permissions he taps 'Allow'. A…
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At one point as a kid we were getting a single FAT combo. Maybe that was a regional thing.
Sure, but the paid advertisements of the combination book were yellow and the opt-out listings were white; were they not?
(Small city)
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> you should consider your real identity linked to it What is the point of these products if not linked to my real identity? That’s the whole idea of them. I use Facebook and WhatsApp to talk to people who know me. That’s why they want to talk to me. If they didn’t know my identity they would want to talk to me.
Of course your real identity is probably involved somewhere. It's just that I, and many others like me, don't think a third party should know what my real identity is. It's not their business. Edit: Unfortunately it probably is their business. A poor choice of words.
For many purposes the companies don’t have to care your ”real” identity
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That's not the only reason. They also allow advertisers to target based on specific phone numbers. It's one of the creepiest features, along with targeting based on e-mail.
What's targeting by specific phone numbers? Area code as a proxy for geo location, or something more sophisticated?