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Ask HN: Is your phone number “private”
3 points by Berniek on Dec 9, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
Most people use one mobile phone number. (unless of course you have a company phone as well as a personal phone) So..is the phone number itself subject to the privacy laws and or privacy statements of websites? Usage would be when you add it to a website for 2FA for instance. Is the website entitled to use it as an identifier? Because it is almost unique it could be used for tracking purposes. It is a unique identifier to you. I am not talking about phone calls, but because it can be associated with your interactions on a website it can be used as data and collated (by Google or Facebook etc). It can be cross referenced with other websites.



Since IP adresses are considered PII under the GDPR, a phone number almost certainly is too.


As a practical matter a phone number given for MFA will be abused for other purposes, that happened at both FB and Twitter[1,2].

If the servers or companies are in America (where I was born), GDPR will be reactive to incidents and thus good opsec is needed since GDPR can't solve a damn thing if you're dead, severely injured, or horrifically traumatized.

That's why I suggest keeping two numbers -- one in a VOIP provider. That's your Signal, that's your "personal" number etc and you can filter what hits the phone in your pocket.

Then you have a sim in your phone that changes often which the above redirects to. (Pick one with a good data plan since connecting to wifi harms location privacy)

Just be wary of VPNs if using Tor, since it will erase the benefit of having multiple circuits[3].

Also on a personal note: I had several IT failures and this setup is currently broken -- I found the password to this account after recovered a passphrase last night I thought I had permanently forgotten after a violent incident -- I hope folks don't abuse the spirit of this advice by filling my phone with death threats, spam, and photos of themselves from the neck down like the last time I gave out privacy advice in the clear

(Sorry I couldn't be more help on the policy side -- those people seem to just... do whatever they want. Be careful!!)

--

[1] https://www.darkreading.com/endpoint/twitter-slip-up-spills-...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20161113094500/https://matt.trau...




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