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Comment by vinni2 | Hacker News Reader

In my country my phone number is associated with everything from my electronic identification to bank transactions. It is part of a multi factor authentication. Giving up my phone number would weaken one of those factors. I don’t like it but the system is like that I don’t have much choice.

If my phone number could be linked to my Facebook data then I am giving away a lot more information than just my phone number.

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Best put your phone number into this site then, so you can find out if you need to change it.

On the other hand, putting one's phone number into that site, or any other utterly anonymous random site (what the F is "newseachday.com" ?) on a whim, is a mistake.

You haven't heard of thenewseachday.com because I quietly put it up online last week.

So? What reason would I have to trust it? Seriously.

I expect you mean well, but the "news" on that site is just an aggregator, like millions of sites with no-so-good intentions. This isn't a good "trust-me" look.

How about answering ashkankiani’s question?

Why is it a mistake? Of what value is a valid phone number absent any other contextual information? Given a day or two, I could write a script to generate and submit all valid phone numbers in the world. Would everyone be doomed by my having entered their numbers?

The contextual information is in the leaked data, which you should assume they have a copy of.

Ok, but then they already have that. What does entering the phone number do that makes it dangerous?

Not super dangerous maybe, but undesirable: It adds your IP address to the data they have.

I've got several different phone numbers, and they each receive different amounts and types of spam. You'd think given the limited size of the phone number space, that spammers would just dial numbers indiscriminately. However, it appears that they still operate using lists of more-likely victims. By entering my phone number in random forms, I'd worry that it could be used as another indication of a good number to call to bother real humans. Of course that's in addition to the obvious doxing of my online nym if done from the wrong browser VM.

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