what do companies do with your phone number ?
what do companies do with your phone number ?
I have a question, what do companies do with your phone number ? can they trace who you are and what you do ?
36 comments
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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”.
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One number to track them all,
One number to find them,
One number to sell for spam,
And in the metadata bind them.
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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.
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Wouldn't it be funny if the law were to order them to periodically send people a copy of all that data?
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It's used to keep you updated on your car's extended warranty
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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.
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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.
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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.
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nothing for now 😀
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Geolocation data brokers will let companies user your phone number to index you based on location (yes... location of your phone)
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if i had a company and had to collect phone numbers then id just message every one of those phone numbers: BRICK
36 comments
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.
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.
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?