One thing I would suspect is they leverage third parties and share your phone number to get back additional known data about you or your interests or other activities which other companies have shared. I think in a way it ends up being a connection point for your data across many places.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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How do you combat this sort of thing? Besides periodically changing your phone number, of course
Obviously, never enter your real number in a web form unless the service depends on you getting called back ... in which case you likely would have called the company by phone anyway.
This is not possible.
Most services that require a phone number also verify it via sms.
Additionally they check so that each number can only be used once, disabling most free sms receivers online.
Oh, i never experienced this. My thought is rather, "nobody will call anyway" ... that said, perhaps it's because i'm largely living outside of online buseness. Location: Europe mostly. What busenesses are you talking about, out of interest?
I tried random numbers and internet numbers with Openai, Wolt and Revolut.
They were all rejected
they're talking about sites like Facebook or Google
If you might ever need to be reached at the number being shared there's always the route of VoIP products like Google Voice (free), or Twilio or MySudo (not free), where one can create virtual numbers for different use cases. In general it's more secure to share a VoIP number anyway since it isn't vulnerable to the same SIM swapping attacks that cell numbers are. I don't know that it's possible to create a Google Voice account without providing a real cell #. One could probably get around that with a burner phone.
Where there is only a short-term need for a reachable number for SMS verification or communication purposes there are services that provide temporary SMS numbers, like mobilesms.io. Because these numbers are recycled frequently, definitely don't use them to register anything important like a bank account or email address.
A lot of services actively disable VoIP numbers from being used for registration or submission.
Do you have any reason to believe this other than "corporations bad"?
Snowden for example
Also have you never heard of data brokers?
They use it as a primary key for linking all your other personal information, use it to geolocate you, use it to sell to marketing lists as a verified number, and use it to cross reference with other sources that leak your phone number.
It’s the “one ring”.
One number to track them all, One number to find them, One number to sell for ads, And in the metadata bind them.
One of the more legitimate uses is to have a decent way of identifying humans. Most humans only have a very limited amount of phone numbers (usually exactly one) and even extreme cases can only acquire a rather limited amount of them.
Contrast that to most other identification methods such as email or online accounts where a singular entity can create limitless amounts of them, that's quite a lot better.
Obviously most companies also abuse your phone number for malicious purposes such as tracking, profiling, spam etc.
In France, every company can, and will, sell your phone number to marketing companies. Whenever I switch from one phone carrier to another, I magically get a lot of phone spam in the following week. Then it stops after I have blocked most unknown callers, but it happens every time for me.
They use it to call you up on the weekends to see if you want to come hang out.
"Hey Niko it's your cousin SiriusXM"
Let's go bowling!
Where is big house?! Where is fast car?!
I wish
if i had a company and had to collect phone numbers then id just message every one of those phone numbers: BRICK
They track everything about the owner of the phone number and all the details of your calls to maximize revenue through data science bullshit
Google's PUBLIC ad call tracking support page
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6197479?hl=en
"By routing calls to your business through a dynamic, trackable phone number, you can get new reporting insights like call duration, call start and end time, caller area code and whether the call was connected"
Doesn't everyone get that on their phone already?
The business you called gets this info about you provided by Google
But can't they just look in their call logs already? My phone tells me all the info you quoted Google as giving.
Geolocation data brokers will let companies user your phone number to index you based on location (yes... location of your phone)
nothing for now 😀