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

https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/03/facebook-phone-number-look-up/ Additional Sources: Now Facebook is allowing anyone to look you up using your securi.. Users are complaining that the phone number Facebook hassled them to use to secure their account with two-factor authentication has also been associated with their user profile — which anyone can use to “look up” their profile. Worse, Facebook doesn’t give you an option to opt-out. Last year, Facebook was forced to admit that after months of pestering its users to switch on two-factor by signing up their phone number, it was also using those phone numbers to target users with ads. But some users are finding out just now that Facebook’s default setting allows everyone — with or without an account — to look up a user profile based off the same phone number previously added to their account. A good twitter thread that was sourced in TechCrunch's Article: https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1101402001907372032

delete facebook

god im glad i dont have facebook

Yeah terminated my account a few years back, good riddance tbh.

fuck facebook, deactivated myself on FB and instagram halfway through last year, such a good call. their scummy practices seem to be increasing with time

god help me escape this place why all the local business and industry ppl hook up in this palce

I never added a phone number to my account. I never trusted them with it. One day, I go to a dealership to buy a car. The guys asks for my phone number, which he uses to pull up my Facebook profile picture. Looks like they get your number if you ever install it on your phone. Now I only browse from a bullshit proxy account, and not from my phone.

If anyone that has your contact info has their phone attached to a Facebook, Whatsapp, or Instagram account then Facebook will still have built a unique identifier for you via that person.

the default option seems to be 'everyone'? What the fuck facebook?

Finally feel like the drawbacks outweigh the benefits of having an account. Fuck my family and friends, gonna delete it. If people need to reach me they'll have to pick up a phone I guess and text me like a fucking grandpa.

I once registered on facebook including my phone number. Not long after, facebook suggested profiles of people who have my phone number, not sure if it was really related to phone number itself but big yikes

Man I wish so much of my job wasn't coordinated over facebook

If you're going to delete your Facebook account, be sure to edit as many posts as you can, upload tons of weird photos of no relevance to you, and edit all of your personal details to be wrong. Poison the well, because they definitely keep your data long after you're gone.

i think i speak for the world when i say: fuck off

Isn't FB data shared with their other apps like Instagram and the rest? yikes?

Oh hey look, more evidence that Social Media's current incarnation is only a cancer and should be shut down forcibly.

Can someone explain the actual damage this can do? I'm having a hard time figuring out how this can negatively impact someone who's set it to "friends only". They have to know your phone number beforehand to find you from it.

Ad companies have your name, photo, and number now. And they can follow you wherever this information is used. And they can use this information to follow you. It's all to steal that juicy consumer data.

That has nothing to do with this article.

Facebook tricked users into giving up their phone numbers under the guise of two-factor authentication. How is that not related to the article?

??? Users did give their phone numbers for two-factor authentication. It still functions for that. While I agree you should be able to disable the feature entirely, they'd still have their number even if this feature didn't exist. This is solely for your friends to find you if they already know your number. Your post had nothing to do with the article because it was just a rant about how ad companies having your data is wrong, but didn't respond to what I asked or what the article was talking about whatsoever.

Facebook is notorious for having shitty background information, as the UK Government's treasure trove of emails showed. Things like Cambridge Analytica happened because Facebook didn't care about what companies would do in the background when it came to mining users data. That means that if someone found a backdoor, they could easily get your phone number and do things like constantly call in with robots about free hotel rooms and more as part of large scale scams. In addition; just because facebook says something doesn't mean its true. They've out right lied to users before and could easily be selling those numbers.

I answered what the damage of them tricking users into getting their phone number to sell to ad companies can do. Which is in the article. Maybe reword your question?

Also, Geel, you clearly didn't read the article either because anyone can look up your number by default. Its not automatically opted for friend's only.

You didn't read my question because I explicitly stated that I was talking about those who set it to "friends only". The main accusation was that you "can't turn it off" when setting it to "friends only", in my view, also completely solves the problem that turning it off would. Therefore I was questioning whether or not it really was that big of a problem when set to "friends only" mode.

Dude, 'friends only' on a social media site with hundreds of millions of users isn't 'friends only'. That's basic security 101; hell 2 Factor Authentication isn't even that good. Its easy to get your number spoofed so long as someone has it.

Okay, and how does that help someone compromise your account or safety, given they have to already know your number to find you through this feature and all it does is show them your Facebook account

Your facebook account, with your posting history, and for many users, the regular places where you go. Who you frequent with, who you hang out with, which groups you're with. For the averaging Facebook user who uses it as a social blog, basically everything that say, a stalker, could use.

From the twitter thread in the op https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1102316652639735809 This is the final frontier of social media and websites as a whole. Anonymity has been on the decline but this has taken it out back and shot it twice. Now instead of having the convenience of being able to change linked emails and passwords on the fly you now have to go out of your way to get a whole new number. And the thought of a data breach of just phone numbers is on the level of someone leaking the entirety of your private info (with the abundance of shady websites that you can just enter a name / phone number and it'll spit out info about the person, their relatives, their address) You are the product not the customer yada yada. And if that isn't enough to spook ya into next week here's an article just from two months ago https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunter-300-dollars-located-phone-microbilt-zumigo-tmobile And an added bonus https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1102318477602447365 "We are programmed to receive, You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave!" https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1303/9f93ea50-6aee-4e5c-bef4-fd6895968427/image.png

You kind of have a point, but also that information has been extremely easy to find since forever. If you have someone's phone number, or an email that they use even semi frequently, they're donezo. Doxxing once you have an identifier like that is piss easy.