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

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

#231

Post by insomniacity »

bertil wrote: post #155
tobr wrote: post #82

If you are a Facebook employee, or are close to one, please help me understand. How does it feel to see reports like this being released almost weekly? I realize people are very good at dealing with moral dissonance when their paycheck depends on it, but surely you must be thinking, talking to your colleagues, about what your personal responsibility in this is?

Overall, the vast majority of similar reports are completely irrelevant, partial or non-sensical. Happy to give details but the most common pattern is the same person demanding that Facebook regulate speech in one sentence and being outraged that Facebook feels allowed to regulate speech before that sentence is over. Most journalists who write about Facebook are deemed as “having no idea what they are talking about”.…

this is the only piece of information that is “User only” and that visibility option was removed because it used to lead to abuses

This seems critically relevant to the issue at hand - can you explain it in a little more detail please?

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

#232

Post by ascorbic »

rocqua wrote: post #162
ascorbic wrote: post #74

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.

They might get around this by not doing it with numbers provided after the GDPR penalties came into effect.

No, that doesn't get them out of it.

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

#233

Post by vokep »

jamisteven wrote: post #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.

While this is true, is 2FA not generally a good thing?

SMS verification increases linkability maybe, but a yubikey or something similar?

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

#234

Post by jseliger »

bertil wrote: post #155
tobr wrote: post #82

If you are a Facebook employee, or are close to one, please help me understand. How does it feel to see reports like this being released almost weekly? I realize people are very good at dealing with moral dissonance when their paycheck depends on it, but surely you must be thinking, talking to your colleagues, about what your personal responsibility in this is?

Overall, the vast majority of similar reports are completely irrelevant, partial or non-sensical. Happy to give details but the most common pattern is the same person demanding that Facebook regulate speech in one sentence and being outraged that Facebook feels allowed to regulate speech before that sentence is over. Most journalists who write about Facebook are deemed as “having no idea what they are talking about”.…

Regarding the media issues, it seems that Facebook is also being used as a convenient scapegoat: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo..., often by reporters who don't even understand the issues they're nominally covering, or who seem to have made up their minds about the system before starting to write.

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

#235

Post by touristtam »

derefr wrote: post #220
touristtam wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't physical "growing up" that we, as a species, need to do. This is the way the whole society act. If you look at politics and corporate world, it feels like a bunch of pre schooler throwing tantrum. As a society we are not acting responsibly. You could argue that the worse are countries that still argue to go to war with their neighbors on the pretends the later are different, but the rest allowing to destroy…

The point I wanted to make here is mostly this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolo... IMHO, it doesn’t make sense to blame “society” for being pre schoolers, any more than it makes sense to blame individual humans for becoming mentally ill. Both are just failure modes of our mental hardware (our tribal-status instincts in the societal case.) The only solution to either that would “stick”—wha…

Thank you for the link. I agree with what the author is saying, mostly. :)

Mind that when I mentioned society as a whole, this is inclusive to its individual parts: There is no society without individuals and as such any judgment on a society is a judgement on its parts. That being said, I know it is a naive view, as no one can condemn a society completely.

As for the bio engineering to try and weed out the "bad wiring", I am not even sure we are close to identify them clearly, as seems to indicate the science articles about the brain and other nervous system in recent years.

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

#236

Post by MaxBarraclough »

Tor3 wrote: post #92
gumby wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My GF uses a google voice number (and separate gmail accounts) for job search purposes both for this reason and because she can nuke the phone number later, cutting off headhunters once she'd found something she likes.

Sounds useful. It's unfortunate that google voice still isn't available outside North America. I don't know if that is for technical reasons or for (European/Asian) political reasons. But it sure would have been nice to keep separate numbers the same way it's sometimes necessary to keep separate google accounts.

There are plenty of other providers. Here in the UK there's LocalPhone.com for instance. They're even able to get you a number in a country of your choice, forwarding to a phone in a country of your choice.

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

#239

Post by shadowprofile76 »

bogomipz wrote: post #190
shadowprofile76 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One major difficulty with leaving Facebook in particular over privacy concerns is that it doesn't really stop the social network from violating your privacy, or letting others do it (often without bad intentions on their part). Aside from its now famous shadow profiles, you've got your friends and family or work/business associates posting things with you in them, photos, videos etc and even naming you (don't think t…

Agreed although I was curious about one of your points, specifically can FB users tag a person who is not on FB? If so this is really troubling. Also do you know if FB uses shadow profiles to suggest tag name in pictures the same as it does for regular users?

I don't think tagging works for people not on FB, though if anyone else here has seen different, i'd love to hear their two cents. As for tagging of people who were on FB but deactivated their profiles. I've seen tags work before and that;s bad enough because even if you try to leave the social network, people can post images or videos of you and associate your name with them regardless. What shadow profiles have to do with these things I don't honestly know, the social network would keep something like that pretty secret I think.

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

#240

Post by Friedduck »

potatofarmer45 wrote: post #14

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 haven’t heard: if you replace your phone number will they maintain the association with your historical one? It’d be trivial to get a Google Voice number or burner to replace yours.
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