Wow, a phone book.
Do HN readers know you can buy lists of millions of people's names and phone numbers from companies whose sole purpose is collecting them, like infogroup?
Do HN readers know you can buy lists of millions of people's names and phone numbers from companies whose sole purpose is collecting them, like infogroup?
A major difference here is the ability - at scale - to associate people with their facebook accounts. There are people who do not want to be associated with by their facebook account, and reasonably so. Not sure why you don't think that wouldn't be a big deal.
I figured that ever since Facebook instituted the "real name" policy, this isn't necessarily possible.
IDK how it works; I just know Facebook requires my real name.
Imagine this: someone is on Facebook and wants to hide their identity for some reason. Best examples I can think of right now is teachers who don't want their profiles accessible to their students (because high schoolers can be little shits). Or someone trying to create a new life after domestic abuse. It makes full sense that they wouldn't want to give their full name so that they can't be found. Facebook isn't good enough in real name detection to get it right 100%. How could they?
With this sort of dump, a domestic abuser can much, much more easily find the person they abused, when that person was previously under a pseudonym.
This is just a small example. It gets much more complicated when considering how many millions of phone number:Facebook IDs were released.
Is this even enforced? I've had a fake name for years (and I have plenty of friends who've done the same).
Also, needlessly to say someone who gives facebook their phone number for verification purposes does likely not expect that the data is leaked or sold without their permission.
Sadly, this isn't the case anymore. People absolutely expect companies to sell or leak every last bit of PII data they have on all their customers now.