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Comment by gerland | Hacker News Reader

I heard someone found shoes that Bill Gates once wore and a gum chewed by Steve Jobs. Both became relics and worshippers write articles about this in the internet.

Seriously though - would someone think it was ok if I got a number after a local bakery owner and started sharing messages that were sent to me by mistake? Is this ok because EM is a more known person? I think it still falls under privacy standards.

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The messages were sent to her number. I don't think there is any privacy violation if you drop mail addressed to 'person residing at this address' at the wrong house.

I agree that there is no privacy law violation, but it is a bit distasteful. We have some implicit standards in the society and it seems those are conveniently ignored at this point. There is some excuse given in the article in the form of "he probably gives out this number to people he does not wish to talk to", which I find a bit suspicious.

When I got letters to previous tenants at my current address I did not open them and share with everyone I met. I sent them to their new address.

My guess is that the real problem that was touched on is Mr. Musk gives the number out to get rid of unwanted contacts.

I had a number like this, except it was for a drug dealer with a similar area code, and most of the crazy texts and calls slowed down after a few months. I have a common name and get similar wacky emails. It's an impossible problem to solve when it is a problem.

Every couple of years stories like this come out. It's pretty common for celebrities to give out old numbers to undesirable contacts. There was a story in the NY papers a few years ago about a guy getting calls from one-night stand hookups of a musician. The musician gave out his number from 20 years ago because it sounded real.

I agree with you that it’s a bit distasteful. But on the other hand there was nothing revealed in the article that was terribly shocking. If that same article were about me instead of Elon Musk, I don’t think I would find it upsetting.

In the UK it's illegal to open someone else's mail even if it was delivered to you.

You can't see whom a text message is addressed to (besides the phone number, but that's obviously wrong here) if you don't actually read the text message. And if you get a letter that's not addressed to anyone but has your address on it, then it's obviously okay for you to open it.

This isn't mail.

I mean, when they say Elon, it's no longer exactly addressed to "the person residing at this address", right?

It's no different from sending an email to the wrong address. Disclaimers to the contrary, it isn't the responsibility of the recipient to ensure the address (phone number, in this case) is right.

There's no other metadata for text message recipient other than the phone number. You can't see that the sender fucked up before you actually read the text message.

Yes and my point wasn't about reading the message but about sharing it with others. If you think you're the intended recipient because the only information you have is the recipient's number, then that's one thing. If it's talking to Elon Musk in the message then it's clearly not addressed to you, so you don't have the same grounds for sharing it.

Well, legally speaking there's really no difference.

Yeah, we're not legally speaking.

As long as you don't share personal information, I don't see the issue. Most of these message chains are, 'hey Elon'. 'Sorry this isn't Elon'. I don't see anything in here that I would have a problem being shared if it the senders had intended it for local bakery owners. Though, in that case, nobody would read the article. 'Woman receives messages intended for local bakery owner' isn't quite as interesting.

It is OK because Musk was contacted for the story, and presumably was fine with it.

Yeah, I find this article really distasteful. Being a public figure shouldn’t mean you have zero privacy.

It actually surprised me that Musk (or any public figure) would give up an old phone number. I would have expected a personal assistant to monitor the old number for a time until the calls/messages stopped.

Same. I’m planning on retiring an old DID for my mom.

Plan is 6 months of “this phone number is retiring, please update to _______, update your records. we’ll connect you now.”

Then 6 months of “this number is retired, hang up and call _____”.

Then 3 months of dead-end (but will review CDRs).

When I cancel it, I plan on calling any new owner to ask them to forward any calls for her to us.

Agreed. These messages are personal and are 100% intended to go to Elon Musk by the people sending them. Regardless of whether they had the wrong number or not, she doesn't have the right to go share them with NPR and the world.

One of the messages suggests he still gives out this number.

This can be nasty. A friend of me once got a ton of phone calls for a specific realtor. Turns out the realtor made a misprint on their business card.

The realtor didn't want to do the expense to print new business cards, so they were just going to give this card to everybody. Could he just forward everybody to them, and maybe fill in their customers on some basic information like opening hours and holidays etc.

This pissed him off enough to sell his phone number to a competing realtor.

I read/heard a similar story of a hotel getting a number that was a digit off from some old woman who'd had it for years. After they refused to change it, she started taking reservations, and booking wedding parties and the like, if the person on the other end didn't believe her when she said they got a wrong number.

The hotel did eventually capitulate.

That same thing happened to my friend M in college. Back then - '89 - our school was probably not unusual in having a campus phone number scheme that was super predictable. The phone number in room X of building Y was 348-xxx1, say, and the next room on the hall was -xxx2, etc.

So if you knew the building, and you knew which room someone lived in, you knew the number. Campus telecom never changed this up at ALL.

Well, in the summer of '89 they built a new rec center, and it obviously got new numbers. And the number they put at the racquetball court reservation desk was one digit off from M's number.

He got racquetball calls ALL THE TIME, but the ones that annoyed him were very early in the morning. He complained to Telecom, but they wouldn't help, so he did what your little old lady did: he started taking reservations -- and to make it worse, he gave out confirmation numbers.

The rec center didn't have a confirmation number system.

After about a week, the racquetball center got a new phone number. Which is hilarious and shows how stuck campus telecom was in their thinking, bc it would've been way simpler (you'd think, anyway) to give M and new number given how much printed matter had the racquetball number on it by then.

> if the person on the other end didn't believe her when she said they got a wrong number

I will never ever understand this behavior (I've seen it in other contexts) of people who refuse to believe an inconvenient truth even when there is strong disincentive for the bearer to be lying, and immediate negative consequences for not recognizing the truth. Like, do they think the receptionist is just pulling a prank??

I recall reading about a local business that lost their phone number of decades to a new hospital that printed a bunch of marketing materials with the wrong number and successfully persuaded the phone company to commandeer the number.

Update: I remember now, the phone company gave them the wrong number to begin with. Just a bizarre story all around, and quite cruel to the original business.

Heh, I remember a case of a telecom thinking they owned a phone number and assigned it.

It worked as expected on their PSTN and cellular network, but not from any other network.

When I was in college living with a roommate, a local daycare mistakenly listed our phone number in the Yellow Pages (it was correct in the white pages), so we’d get calls from potential (and existing?) customers. At first we’d tell them “wrong number” but my roommate liked messing with them (the constant calls were a nuisance) and would say they were out of business and other nonsense. The daycare eventually caught on and so the phone company called me and asked if we were telling people they closed (we denied it), and then offered us $200 to let them change our number as compensation. They said it would cover the cost of the calls we’d have to make to tell people about our new phone number, but it felt like a fortune to me as a college kid (more than half our rent).

Point is, giving out the wrong number to people is not good marketing. That would be like letting your domain name expire in today’s world.

This is related to how we got phone numbers in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger#Rotary_di...

Something similar happened to me, some shop misprinted some flyers and put our landline number on them. We got calls for years and sometime we still get some (you can infer how much time has passed since by the fact I'm talking about a landline)

It could just be someone who googled his name, found his old number, and found out that Musk attended an event the week before that, and just pretended to have met him in person during that event.

Very convenient for the author of the post, right?

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