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Comment by aww_dang | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if your fake contact's randomly created email or phone number is on a terror watch list.

I think that's exactly the point of this. I remember people on Usenet posting random shit like "construct bomb kill president" when the news about Echelon came out.

The documentation states that it uses a non-allocated country code (+21). So it seems unlikely to happen.

Doesnt this defeat the purpose tho as it could be filtered?

Yes, this data could be quickly mitigated.

The us government monitored all DC residents personal communication for over 2 years because they fat fingered the collection regex. The country code for Egypt is +20, the DC area code is 202.

You think that was a mistake, huh?

That is a mistake that sounds suspiciously self serving, given how many powerful people live and work there

+21 isn't allocated, but

   +211 South Sudan
   +212 Morocco
   +213 Algeria
   +216 Tunisia
   +218 Libya

Someone putting random numbers after +21 because it's unallocated has a fundamental misunderstanding of international phone numbers.

But also, the server side is likely to throw away invalid numbers to start with. It's simple and easy to do, and reduces the data storage by a lot (there's a lot of garbage in people's address books)

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