You Gave Facebook Your Number for Security. They Used It for Ads | Hacker News Reader

You Gave Facebook Your Number for Security. They Used It for Ads

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66 pointsgrammers11 comments

Is there a way to ask for what information Facebook has of a non-user (like myself), ask to have it deleted, and ask Facebook to not collect information about me since I am not a user?

Let me rephrase your question:

Is there a way to ask Facebook to completely change their business model and lose all revenue?

Now that everyone has a cell phone and keeps the same number forever, your phone number is the new social security number. Think of all the places social security numbers were used because they were a fixed identifier and how we now think that that was a bad idea. Laws were passed against companies using them. Giving out your phone number is the same problem except many companies have some legitimate reason to collect it (see the article) and then what do you do?

Getting a new phone number is a walk in the park compared to a new SS#

I too protect my phone number like my SSN. When a lot of services started to offer 2FA via mobile nimber I bought a cheap SIM Card and used a raspberry pi I had laying around to build a SMS<->Telegram bot. I now use this mobile number for 2FA services or services I don‘t trust.

I can probably buy your SSN for under $10, conservatively.

>then what do you do?

Give up, stop answering your phone.

Something that I haven't seen mentioned before, though I've seen on my account. There's a time when I noticed that Facebook still had my number, so I removed it. When I removed it, FB replaced my number with a random number (which looked like a number of someone else in my country). Might have been a bug at the time, as that's not the case now.

That event when I knew that I had removed my number, but still found it active; made me not trust Facebook.

Happened to me as well. I was always curious about that because it was clearly another cell number. I did try and text that number once and give that person a heads up but no response back. I’d really like to know what that was because my thinking is that if that is indeed someone else’s cell, then your number is appearing elsewhere too. The strange thing is it wasn’t a number that I’ve ever associated with so then populating it with a “best guess” isn’t even true.

I was forced to add it the other day to log into another app with facebook. I was very annoyed as I have always avoided doing it

You were not "forced". There were other options. I can think of a very simple one that I would have taken.

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