I have a question, what do companies do with your phone number ? can they trace who you are and what you do ?
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.
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.
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.
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
Do you have any reason to believe this other than “corporations bad”?
Snowden for example
Also have you never heard of data brokers?
if i had a company and had to collect phone numbers then id just message every one of those phone numbers: BRICK
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.
