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Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

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131–140 of 261 posts

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#131
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally get people want a "only me" option here, but really how bad is "friends-only" here? If I'm "friends" with you, you probably already know my phone number in real life.

Because a "facebook friend" isn't an actual friend, and having these "friends" have my phone number is like everyone in a bar being able to look up my number. Or perhaps like going to a work conference and everyone being able to call me. The random "How are you are you single wanna talk about sex with me?!!???" messages are bad enough. I certainly don't want those as phone calls. Those on the list that are actual Fri…

Letting your friends have your number is a separate setting you can turn off (at least for now). This is about friends who have your number being able tell that it is your number, I think.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#132

This will make keeping your social media private during recruiting much much harder because rather than trying to search for your name on FB or your email, an interviewer can just search your listed contact number. Names are often not unique but phone numbers are. This matters because creating a new email account for recruiting is trivial, yet creating a new phone number for recruiting is not. Most phones are not dua…

I think VOIP has great untapped potential for this, having helped many people get vanity numbers with their name embedded. Once the job hunt is over, you can literally reject all calls, and build a caller ID blacklist of spammy companies and recruiters. Plus, numbers are 1/4th to 1/10th the cost of domains these days.

Are they? I pay $1/mo for phone numbers, which is quite close to what I pay for most of my domains.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#133

This will make keeping your social media private during recruiting much much harder because rather than trying to search for your name on FB or your email, an interviewer can just search your listed contact number. Names are often not unique but phone numbers are. This matters because creating a new email account for recruiting is trivial, yet creating a new phone number for recruiting is not. Most phones are not dua…

You use your real phone number on FB? MY no on there is a fake (but real number in my area code).

And I don't put my Mobile number on FB at all.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#134
post #5

I've designed an OSINT system with this specific feature in mind (it's on github since a few months). Basically being able to go from phonenumber->accounts is very powerful and works even more efficiently to identify a person than an email address or even a real name. The abuse potential of this is far greater than some people assume.

Can you post the link to your project?

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#135
post #48

I refused the 2FA nag on Facebook because I didn’t want them to have my phone number Then after a while the nag started popping up with my phone number already filled out. Really fucking creepy and not okay.

Might be your browser doing that.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also a non negligible number of people using an alias on facebook because they have good reason. Apparently when a woman uses a pseudonym on facebook, it is not unlikely that it is because of a nasty/stalkerish ex that she would rather get away from. I am actually in favor of a transparent society (a la david brin) , but we have to grown up a lot and handle such cases before the advantages that come with it…

> in favor of a transparent society I suggest you read The Transparent Society by Byung-Chul Han. It’s a brutal 50-page indictment of the hypercult of transparency and its effects on the human soul, on the political discourse, and on traditional values like truth and beauty. Might change your view on the costs of transparency.

There is a thoughtful counterargument to Han here:

https://mesocosm.net/2013/10/01/digital-humanism/

IMO it doesn't sufficiently deal with the problems of the "full transparancy" ideal that Han points out though.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think VOIP has great untapped potential for this, having helped many people get vanity numbers with their name embedded. Once the job hunt is over, you can literally reject all calls, and build a caller ID blacklist of spammy companies and recruiters. Plus, numbers are 1/4th to 1/10th the cost of domains these days.

Are they? I pay $1/mo for phone numbers, which is quite close to what I pay for most of my domains.

phone numbers cost close to nothing to operators, but running a voip infrastructure hast its costs, and a lot of those costs come from protecting it from hacking attempts. They love open pbx boxes where they can generate a significant cost, or use to spam others.

also compassion with domain is not exactly fair in this case, it would make more sense to compare it to ip address.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#138
Been warning people about this for years. Every major social media company has been pushing this shit as "security", when in reality its whats known in intelligence circles as "linkability". The more points of verification, the better a profile can be built to associate an actual identity with an email address, screen name, username, alias, etc. Snowden warned everyone about this, nobody listened.

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#139

This is surely a breach of GDRP. One of the principles is that data must only be used for the purpose for which it was collected. Taking a number provided explicitly for 2FA and using it for search certainly sounds like a breach.

What does GDPR say about using data about other people provided by a user (eg a Facebook user who shares their contact info — thus providing Facebook info on all their contacts). What is the “intended purpose” of sharing all your contact’s details ...?

Re: Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting

#140

This will make keeping your social media private during recruiting much much harder because rather than trying to search for your name on FB or your email, an interviewer can just search your listed contact number. Names are often not unique but phone numbers are. This matters because creating a new email account for recruiting is trivial, yet creating a new phone number for recruiting is not. Most phones are not dua…

Second phone numbers aren’t that hard or expensive. you don’t need a second sim, just an app. There is a yc startup providing them: openphone
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