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Comment by aheilbut | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm dating myself, but didn't we used to call that the phone book?

Fuck, misclicked downvote (wanted to upvote). Really great how HN does not allow changing votes at least once. Sorry for that, but yeah good point.

Nowadays one or a few phone numbers are unique to you, which makes it linkable to other things. Linkability is something that breaks privacy, so if you don't want your full name to be known somewhere, it is important to be able to keep things separate. When your phone number goes public (e.g. resumé and snapchat), that anonymity is broken.

Someone always does it for me, so here is a compensation up vote. I agree, a few mins of vote changing grace wod be nice.

Setting aside the privacy of cell versus landline numbers, the phone book never had anything analogous to a Snapchat user name.

Yeah, it had your actual name AND your address.

I strongly disagree that your street address being linked to your name is the same as your pseudonymous snapchat username being linked to your cell phone number.

I hope you're agreeing that the street address is way more private than a snapchat user name...

I think the point is that we expect our phone numbers to identify us in the real world but don't expect them to point to our handles online. If I use the same username on Snapchat that I do for something embarrassing like, say, my tumblr, someone who knows me IRL can look me up and find my more private online presence. This is just as real an issue as the reverse scenario in which Internet stalkers find out my phone number or something.

Now generally it's advisable to use a unique handle (or your real name) for a service so closely tied to a piece of real life identification like your phone number, but I don't think a lot of people do it.

One can always change street addresses. But it's a royal pain to create new usernames.

at some point people started thinking that mobile phones somehow need to be more personal than land lines.

In the specific case though, it's as if you had already asked to be removed from the phone book (implicitly trusting the company), and then your number was published anyway.

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