what to do if someone is giving out your phone number

Tech Fix

I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn't Have.

Our personal tech columnist asked security researchers what they could find out about him from just his cellphone number. Quite a lot, it turns out.

Credit... Glenn Harvey

Aug. fifteen, 2019

For most of our lives, we have been conditioned to share a piece of personal information without a moment's hesitation: our phone number.

We punch in our digits at the grocery store to get a member disbelieve or at the pharmacy to pick upwardly medication. When nosotros sign up to employ apps and websites, they oft ask for our phone number to verify our identity.

This cavalcade will encourage a new do. Earlier you hand over your number, ask yourself: Is it worth the risk?

This question is crucial now that our chief phone numbers take shifted from landlines to mobile devices, our virtually intimate tools, which often live with u.s. around the clock. Our mobile phone numbers have become permanently attached to us because nosotros rarely modify them, porting them from job to task and identify to place.

At the same fourth dimension, the string of digits has increasingly go connected to apps and online services that are hooked into our personal lives. And information technology tin atomic number 82 to information from our offline worlds, including where we alive and more than.

In fact, your phone number may have at present become an even stronger identifier than your full name. I recently found this out immediate when I asked Fyde, a mobile security firm in Palo Alto, Calif., to use my digits to demonstrate the potential risks of sharing a telephone number.

Emre Tezisci, a security researcher at Fyde with a background in telecommunications, took on the task with gusto. He and I had never met or talked. He quickly plugged my cellphone number into a public records directory. Soon, he had a full dossier on me — including my proper name and birth engagement, my address, the holding taxes I pay and the names of members of my family.

From there, it could take easily gotten worse. Mr. Tezisci could accept used that information to effort to respond security questions to break into my online accounts. Or he could have targeted my family and me with sophisticated phishing attacks. He and the other researchers at Fyde opted not to do so, since such attacks are illegal.

"If you want to give out your number, you lot are taking additional take chances that yous might not be enlightened of," said Sinan Eren, master executive of Fyde. "Because of collisions in names due to the massive number of people online today, a phone number is a stronger identifier."

In that location is no simple solution to this. In some situations, giving your digits to institutions like your bank provides an extra layer of security. But in nearly cases, the potential dangers and annoyances of handing out your number outweigh the benefits, as you will read below.

How your phone number exposes you

It took merely an hour for my cellphone number to expose my life.

All that Mr. Tezisci, the researcher, had to practise was plug my number into White Pages Premium, an online database that charges $5 a month for access to public records. He and then did a thorough web search and followed a data trail — linking my name and address to information in other online background-checking tools and public records — to track down more details.

In an hour, this is what came upwards:

• My current home accost, its foursquare footage, the toll of the property and the taxes I pay on it.

• My by addresses from the last decade.

• The total names of my mother, father, sister and aunt.

• My past phone numbers, including the landline for my parents' home.

• Data about a property I previously endemic, including its foursquare footage and the mortgage taken out on information technology.

• My lack of a criminal record.

While Fyde declined to hack into my accounts using the obtained data and my number, the visitor warned that in that location was enough an attacker could practise:

• A hacker could try to reset my countersign for an online account by answering security questions like "What is your female parent'south maiden proper name?" or "Which of the previous addresses did y'all alive at?"

• An attacker could use the personal information linked to my phone number to trick a customer service representative for my telephone carrier into porting my number onto a new SIM menu, thus hijacking my digits — a practise called SIM swapping.

• A hijacker with control of my telephone number could so interruption into my accounts if I had mechanisms in place to receive a security code in a text message when logging in to an online account.

• A scammer could likewise utilize my hijacked telephone number to trick members of my family into sharing their passwords or sending money.

• A scammer could also target my telephone number with phishing texts and robocalls.

• An intruder could utilize cognition of my telephone number to call my voice mail inbox and attempt to cleft the personal identification number to listen to my letters.

Marketers could also take advantage:

• An advertising tech bureau could add together my number to a detailed contour about me, linked to other information about my identity and web-browsing activities.

• If I signed up for an internet service with my phone number, a brand that bought my digits from an advertisement firm could upload them into an ad tech tool to correlate the number with my online contour and serve targeted ads.

• A shady marketing bureau could add my number to a database to blast me with spam calls and text-messaged promotions.

When information technology'due south wise to share your number (and when it's non)

There are some situations when sharing your phone number is reasonable.

When you lot enter your user name and password to get into your online banking account, the depository financial institution may call or text you lot with a temporary code that yous must enter before you can log in. This is a security mechanism known as ii-cistron verification. In this situation, your phone number is a useful actress cistron to bear witness you lot are who yous say yous are.

"A telephone number is a better identifier than simply your name, but sometimes y'all want that," said Simon Thorpe, managing director of production for Twilio, a communications company that works with phone carriers on combating robocalls.

Only which companies should you trust with your telephone number? Hither'southward where things go tricky.

Plenty of tech companies let yous use your telephone number to protect your accounts from unauthorized admission. But even some legitimate brands similar Facebook have been scrutinized for improper utilise of phone numbers.

Terminal year, a study past the tech blog Gizmodo found that after a Facebook user set up upwards ii-step verification with his phone number, advertisers that uploaded his digits into Facebook's database could match them to his Facebook profile and serve targeted ads. Separately, some people complained this year that the social network allowed them to expect up a person's Facebook profile just past typing a phone number into its search bar.

The visitor has removed the ability to find people's profiles past entering their phone number, said Rochelle Nadhiri, a Facebook spokeswoman. She added that when a user set upward ii-stride verification with a phone number, the company would not use the data to serve targeted ads.

But when large companies like Facebook abuse your digits, whom do you trust?

Unfortunately, there is no peachy solution. It all involves piece of work.

That includes first request yourself whether the benefits of giving out your phone number outweigh the potential risks.

You might too desire to set a second phone number to cloak your personal digits birthday. Yous could share this second phone number with people and brands you don't entirely trust. Apps like Google Vox and Burner let y'all create a unlike number that yous can use for calls and texts.

Equally for two-factor hallmark, most tech companies offering other verification options. They include apps that generate temporary security codes or a physical security key that tin be plugged in. By and large, those are safer to employ than a phone number.

Hither's a bonus piece of communication. If you lot have business organisation cards with your personal number printed on them, shred them and order new ones with merely your part line.

Eventually, I spoke to Mr. Tezisci near his experience tracking me. He said he was surprised past how hands a person could be targeted with a single set of numbers.

"I simply spent an hour, and I was able to see all your addresses and all phone numbers," he told me. "I retrieve that's scary, isn't it? And I selected the legal options. If I were a scammer, I would have gone for your relatives."

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/technology/personaltech/i-shared-my-phone-number-i-learned-i-shouldnt-have.html

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