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"The worst that can happen"... In a world where your bank thinks that SMS is good enough for 2FA... phone number plus other info is good enough for credit re

"The worst that can happen"... In a world where your bank thinks that SMS is good enough for 2FA... phone number plus other info is good enough for credit reporting agencies to send out your complete file... Variations of this theme. Also, this dump is once more confirmation that Facebook owns lots of data about its users, and doesn't care to protect that data, or to give its users the ability to control personal information. Why should they care? They suffer no consequences for this lack.

Syonyk 6y ago
I've had my phone number for... oh, 18-19 years. I assume it's utterly trivial for anyone who cares to find it, if they care to. I know it is, because I've had the occasional random call from people who wanted to give me a call for one reason or another. And, certainly, Facebook suffers no consequences. A while back, some people noticed that if a company was in the news for a catastrophic data breech, their stock tended to climb immediately afterwards. No such thing as bad press coverage, at least in the age of the trading algorithms!
neogodless 6y ago
Yup - there's another thread related to this breach. A comment led me to do a google search on my phone number. I found FastPeopleSearch.com, which not only had my current phone number and physical address, but my previous cell phone number, land lines (from back when those were a thing), my Vonage phone number, and previous addresses, all dating about 20 years. If you know my name, you can get a lot more... thanks to these aggregators of public records. You can attempt to have yourself removed but there are a lot of these types of sites. Of course, if you take "a" phone number, and use the google search technique, you'll find one of those sites like FastPeopleSearch and learn a lot more about who the phone number belongs to. But presumably anyone who's trying to make use of all this information could do all that without the Facebook breach, if they automate the process. Of course, the Facebook breach ties a bunch of information to a phone number in a, perhaps, tidy package?

Syonyk 6y ago

I've had my phone number for... oh, 18-19 years. I assume it's utterly trivial for anyone who cares to find it, if they care to. I know it is, because I've had the occasional random call from people who wanted to give me a call for one reason or another. And, certainly, Facebook suffers no consequences. A while back, some people noticed that if a company was in the news for a catastrophic data breech, their stock tended to climb immediately afterwards. No such thing as bad press coverage, at least in the age of the trading algorithms!

neogodless 6y ago

Yup - there's another thread related to this breach. A comment led me to do a google search on my phone number. I found FastPeopleSearch.com, which not only had my current phone number and physical address, but my previous cell phone number, land lines (from back when those were a thing), my Vonage phone number, and previous addresses, all dating about 20 years. If you know my name, you can get a lot more... thanks to these aggregators of public records. You can attempt to have yourself removed but there are a lot of these types of sites. Of course, if you take "a" phone number, and use the google search technique, you'll find one of those sites like FastPeopleSearch and learn a lot more about who the phone number belongs to. But presumably anyone who's trying to make use of all this information could do all that without the Facebook breach, if they automate the process. Of course, the Facebook breach ties a bunch of information to a phone number in a, perhaps, tidy package?