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Phone numbers are not unique values, you should never assume that a phone number alone (or even a phone number and last name) is enough information to uniquely
by MagicWishMonkey 13y ago
Phone numbers are not unique values, you should never assume that a phone number alone (or even a phone number and last name) is enough information to uniquely identify an individual.
Case in point: I work with a guy who used to work at his dads office. He and his dad both have the same name, and they both had the same office number. This algorithm would incorrectly identify both people as being the same person when in fact they are not.
- sln 13y agoPhone numbers are unique values when you need to call a phone or send an SMS, which is what this software does. If you were trying to do your taxes, sure...but in this case a phone number is exactly enough.
- MagicWishMonkey 13y agoLots of folks still use land lines.
- milkshakes 13y agoThey probably aren't trying to use TextSecure with their landlines though.
- tinco 13y agoYou should never assume that any piece of information is not enough to uniquely identify an individual. You are thinking from the point of view of a database administrator, whose job it is to make it easy to uniquely identify an entity. In security it's about making it as hard as possible to deduce even the slightest of information about a person, increasing the k-anonymity as they say. For all intents and purposes, that a phone number resolves to only two people, and they're also conveniently located geographically near to each other, and are probably very distinct in a whole range of other things, makes it the perfect key for any security adversary.
- MagicWishMonkey 13y agoYou make a good point, my job is to make it simple for machines to differentiate between two people, a task a human could do easily.