One thing I would suspect is they leverage third parties and share your phone number to get back additional known data about you or your interests or other activities which other companies have shared. I think in a way it ends up being a connection point for your data across many places.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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How do you combat this sort of thing? Besides periodically changing your phone number, of course
Obviously, never enter your real number in a web form unless the service depends on you getting called back ... in which case you likely would have called the company by phone anyway.
This is not possible.
Most services that require a phone number also verify it via sms.
Additionally they check so that each number can only be used once, disabling most free sms receivers online.
Yep. I've tried using dummy numbers in the past for things where no phone contact is required for contact and it frequently triggers fraud prevention even if not rendered useless by sms verification before submission.
Oh, i never experienced this. My thought is rather, "nobody will call anyway" ... that said, perhaps it's because i'm largely living outside of online buseness. Location: Europe mostly. What busenesses are you talking about, out of interest?
they're talking about sites like Facebook or Google
I tried random numbers and internet numbers with Openai, Wolt and Revolut.
They were all rejected
If you might ever need to be reached at the number being shared there's always the route of VoIP products like Google Voice (free), or Twilio or MySudo (not free), where one can create virtual numbers for different use cases. In general it's more secure to share a VoIP number anyway since it isn't vulnerable to the same SIM swapping attacks that cell numbers are. I don't know that it's possible to create a Google Voice account without providing a real cell #. One could probably get around that with a burner phone.
Where there is only a short-term need for a reachable number for SMS verification or communication purposes there are services that provide temporary SMS numbers, like mobilesms.io. Because these numbers are recycled frequently, definitely don't use them to register anything important like a bank account or email address.
A lot of services actively disable VoIP numbers from being used for registration or submission.
This is creepy AF man...
Do you have any reason to believe this other than "corporations bad"?
Snowden for example
Also have you never heard of data brokers?
They use it as a primary key for linking all your other personal information, use it to geolocate you, use it to sell to marketing lists as a verified number, and use it to cross reference with other sources that leak your phone number.
It’s the “one ring”.
One number to track them all,
One number to find them,
One number to sell for spam,
And in the metadata bind them.
Many companies sell your data to data brokers, and a phone number can act as a unique identifier across several data sources, allowing brokers to merge several data profiles together into a mega-profile about you.
Wouldn't it be funny if the law were to order them to periodically send people a copy of all that data?
In many places companies are already required to do so on request. Which is why data brokers regularly change their names. If you don’t know who they are, you can’t request your data or ask to have it purged.
Exactly, on request. But what if we forced them to do so automatically, without it having to be requested?
They'd come up with the most wild and hilarious excuses, wouldn't they
It's used to keep you updated on your car's extended warranty
One of the more legitimate uses is to have a decent way of identifying humans. Most humans only have a very limited amount of phone numbers (usually exactly one) and even extreme cases can only acquire a rather limited amount of them.
Contrast that to most other identification methods such as email or online accounts where a singular entity can create limitless amounts of them, that's quite a lot better.
Obviously most companies also abuse your phone number for malicious purposes such as tracking, profiling, spam etc.
Depends on the company. It's often used innocently to identify that you are a person, and a specific person. Other times it gets tossed into huge data bases. I work in sales and it's crazy what personal details you can see about people when you use expensive Software.
In France, every company can, and will, sell your phone number to marketing companies. Whenever I switch from one phone carrier to another, I magically get a lot of phone spam in the following week. Then it stops after I have blocked most unknown callers, but it happens every time for me.
They use it to call you up on the weekends to see if you want to come hang out.
"Hey Niko it's your cousin SiriusXM"
Let's go bowling!
Where is big house?! Where is fast car?!
"I told you I don't want to hang out with you."
"I'm sorry, but I'll need that rejection mailed to me by post in a hand-signed letter."
I wish
nothing for now 😀
Geolocation data brokers will let companies user your phone number to index you based on location (yes... location of your phone)
if i had a company and had to collect phone numbers then id just message every one of those phone numbers: BRICK