The first thing twitter proposes when you create an account : "Do you want to match emails and phone numbers to account".
In this thread : "How can it be possible to match emails and phone numbers to accounts?"
It's not a loophole, it's a feature.
It's in the TOS before you sign up : "Twitter also uses your contact information to market to you as your country’s laws allow, and to help others find your account if your settings permit, including through third-party services and client applications."
How can someone then not realize this is a possibility ? At what moment can someone start to even begin to think twitter is a safe place for endangered people ? It's an ad company, what do you expect really ?
The fact that you're citing the TOS is not exactly helping your case, since it's well known that basically no one reads those. I'm not as concerned about techy people as I am about the average person's understanding of their identity privacy on Twitter.
But even as a techy person I was surprised by how easy it is for a random person to link millions of identities. And I'm obviously not alone given that this post made it to the front page. So when you say "what do you expect really?" - well, most people expect that a random person can't discover their email from their twitter handle. I think that's a completely fair expectation, and people should rightly be concerned about this "feature". Posts like this should be upvoted, because a lot of people aren't aware.
Your incredulity here tends to come across as "it's in the TOS, you're all pretty ignorant, I knew about this all along." which isn't all that helpful, even if it's all true.
In this thread : "How can it be possible to match emails and phone numbers to accounts?"
It's not a loophole, it's a feature.
It's in the TOS before you sign up : "Twitter also uses your contact information to market to you as your country’s laws allow, and to help others find your account if your settings permit, including through third-party services and client applications."
How can someone then not realize this is a possibility ? At what moment can someone start to even begin to think twitter is a safe place for endangered people ? It's an ad company, what do you expect really ?