3 ms·

I buy corporate contacts from farms and I think they get a lot of them from apps that force you to upload all your contacts as the price to use them. Your perso

I buy corporate contacts from farms and I think they get a lot of them from apps that force you to upload all your contacts as the price to use them. Your personal contact information is probably in dozens of your friends and colleague's phones.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Interesting.. It could be but I kinda doubt it. I'm actually very careful with my data. The only such app I use is whatsapp. I'm very hesitant to install most apps and all the ones I use the most are from F-Droid (open source). The apps that do spying/telemetry etc I all use inside a work profile where they can't access my contacts or pictures and I run a tracking blocker inside that work profile. This makes Whatsapp awkward to use as but these days I just use a matrix bridge anyway so I can override the whatsapp label. On LinkedIn I blocked my last name to non-contacts (everyone else it just shows my initial) because our work has a simple email address naming scheme (first.last@company.com). But still I get an absolute ton of them. Literally several per day. It's so annoying, though most of them are not as persistant as I mentioned in my post above. All of them seem to be from the US by the way, and always trying to propose meetings during US timezones so they seem unaware that I'm in Europe. I'm kinda suspecting a data leak in the past or something.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Just to be clear (and you might have read it this way) - I meant that people you know, who have you in their contacts, have installed apps on their phones which pulled in all their contacts and that meant the app got your contact info from them. I'm 99% certain that's where the sites I buy my data get theirs. One of the sites won't even let me log in without giving up all my contacts, but I have a $15 phone on Boost with zero contacts on it to use in these kind of scummy scenarios.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Ahhh now I get you. Yes that is indeed very likely. I tend to focus too much on keeping my own yard safe and forget I'm walking through everyone else's too.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Interesting.. It could be but I kinda doubt it. I'm actually very careful with my data. The only such app I use is whatsapp. I'm very hesitant to install most apps and all the ones I use the most are from F-Droid (open source). The apps that do spying/telemetry etc I all use inside a work profile where they can't access my contacts or pictures and I run a tracking blocker inside that work profile. This makes Whatsapp awkward to use as but these days I just use a matrix bridge anyway so I can override the whatsapp label. On LinkedIn I blocked my last name to non-contacts (everyone else it just shows my initial) because our work has a simple email address naming scheme (first.last@company.com). But still I get an absolute ton of them. Literally several per day. It's so annoying, though most of them are not as persistant as I mentioned in my post above. All of them seem to be from the US by the way, and always trying to propose meetings during US timezones so they seem unaware that I'm in Europe. I'm kinda suspecting a data leak in the past or something.

kingcharles 5y ago
Just to be clear (and you might have read it this way) - I meant that people you know, who have you in their contacts, have installed apps on their phones which pulled in all their contacts and that meant the app got your contact info from them. I'm 99% certain that's where the sites I buy my data get theirs. One of the sites won't even let me log in without giving up all my contacts, but I have a $15 phone on Boost with zero contacts on it to use in these kind of scummy scenarios.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Ahhh now I get you. Yes that is indeed very likely. I tend to focus too much on keeping my own yard safe and forget I'm walking through everyone else's too.