Your friends/family probably won’t do this, so your phone number is going to be shared with Twitter anyways.
I would love a version of privacy.com for phone numbers..
> I would love a version of privacy.com for phone numbers..
I've used google voice and twilio for something similar, though nowhere near as plug and play as a privacy.com-like solution.
A cell phone number does not equal your kitchen phone in terms of access to information. The whole this is moot. The issue now is that this is my personal phone number, me, personally, and is being used as a piece of validating information in a variety of compromises databases.
I used it at a summer job in the late 80’s. You could order reverse lookup books for anywhere you wanted, and of course could get that data electronically too. You could also call information for anywhere you could think of by dialing the area code plus 555-1212.
With the twitter leak millions of phone numbers/names are available for free instantly, and the technology to do some harm with them is readily available.
Phone numbers used to be really public. As in "Someone has collected your phone number, your address and family name and put it in this huge book they update every year. And they drop a copy of this book on everybody's porch.".
You could always ask your friend to relay a message right?
It's not like I had glimpsed someone's shoulders and wanted to cold call them to pitch them my startup idea of the week or creepily ask for a date (I remember it was to follow through with a conversation about DIY hydroponic with one and coffee brewing with another). Friend got tired of relaying messages at some point :). We rarely got to the point of giving out contact information on the moment though (that was the flow of those meetings and I think it's not a cultural thing to exchange business card in such settings in my country). Also, we are not the kind of people to hang on facebook, so discovery is weak.
Totally agree it is correct behaviour with strangers though.
And it was only a minor annoyance at some point so well... no biggie. (Except that time he divorced and he wouldn't give me his ex-wife's number so I could get back some DVD she had borrowed)
edit: also, I wouldn't ask for contact info if I wasn't confident that it was okay for the person to get a call from me and I am confident that my friend knows I won't mess up things by being inappropriate.
I've had several friends ask if it's okay to give out my contact information to third parties who were interested in acquiring this information to continue conversations through more private channels.
But there was always an element of consent involved on my part.
The message your friend could have relayed could have been “hey is it ok if I get your contact info?”.
What your friend isn’t getting right is that maybe you and his friends DO want to contact each other. He is deciding for both parties that they don’t. He could adjust his behaviour on that front a bit.
Is there a reason you do not ask those people for their contact information directly?
As long as one of your friends or relatives has and accepts to upload their contact list (with your number included).