Hacker News Reader

I haven't had the chance to check the dump but I am sure Facebook had my phone number. I'm surprised this site says my number wasn't leaked.

View on HN

If "Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?" setting wasn't set to "Everyone" in your privacy settings, then your phone number wouldn't be visible to the scraping campaign that was the source of this.

Thanks for saying this. Seems like most people have a misunderstanding of where the data came from.

To clarify: in 2019 you could enter a phone number into Facebook search and it would show you whichever profile was associated with the number of it was set to public.

The “hackers” set up a script to go through every number sequentially: 15550000000, 15550000001, etc.

I would be very surprised if the original data doesn’t contains a LOT more information —- basically everything that can be found by publicly viewing your profile page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com