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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Lately I'm not comfortable with naming and shaming, my apologies.

That's a shame, the company surely has no qualms about giving away access to your personal information.

I don't think OP indicated the carrier shared personal information - only that they provided a way to connect a 3rd party company to a customer. That transaction doesn't need to include any information beyond the defined demographic.

That's correct. Apparently they put me in a certain demographics bucket and the spammers can pay the carrier to call or SMS random person from that bucket, sometimes that's me. So they know my gender, approximate age and location(maybe some other stuff?) but they don't know my name.

To clarify: I think you're saying they don't know your name, but at least as important they don't know your actual contact details (phone, address, email).

TBH, this a system that if it's opt-in only, I don't have much of a problem with. If it's opt-out, I'm annoyed. If it's required, we should change policy.

The system is not advertised on the carrier portal, there’s no indication that you opted in and there’s no option to opt out.

To know about it, you need to be annoying like me and investigate. Once I learned about it through questioning the spammer, I called the carrier and requested opt out. First the call center people didn’t know what I’m talking about then at some point they used some innocent sounding name for it and promised that I’m out. I still receive spam everyday.

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