
You Gave Facebook Your Number for Security. They Used It for Ads - grammers
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/you-gave-facebook-your-number-security-they-used-it-ads
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tareqak
Is there a way to ask for what information Facebook has of a non-user (like
myself), ask to have it deleted, and ask Facebook to not collect information
about me since I am not a user?

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adtac
Let me rephrase your question:

Is there a way to ask Facebook to completely change their business model and
lose all revenue?

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njarboe
Now that everyone has a cell phone and keeps the same number forever, your
phone number is the new social security number. Think of all the places social
security numbers were used because they were a fixed identifier and how we now
think that that was a bad idea. Laws were passed against companies using them.
Giving out your phone number is the same problem except many companies have
some legitimate reason to collect it (see the article) and then what do you
do?

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jonaswi
I too protect my phone number like my SSN. When a lot of services started to
offer 2FA via mobile nimber I bought a cheap SIM Card and used a raspberry pi
I had laying around to build a SMS<->Telegram bot. I now use this mobile
number for 2FA services or services I don‘t trust.

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acct1771
I can probably buy your SSN for under $10, conservatively.

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nevi-me
Something that I haven't seen mentioned before, though I've seen on my
account. There's a time when I noticed that Facebook still had my number, so I
removed it. When I removed it, FB replaced my number with a random number
(which looked like a number of someone else in my country). Might have been a
bug at the time, as that's not the case now.

That event when I knew that I had removed my number, but still found it
active; made me not trust Facebook.

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richsherwood
Happened to me as well. I was always curious about that because it was clearly
another cell number. I did try and text that number once and give that person
a heads up but no response back. I’d really like to know what that was because
my thinking is that if that is indeed someone else’s cell, then your number is
appearing elsewhere too. The strange thing is it wasn’t a number that I’ve
ever associated with so then populating it with a “best guess” isn’t even
true.

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Paraesthetic
I was forced to add it the other day to log into another app with facebook. I
was very annoyed as I have always avoided doing it

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brokenmachine
You were not "forced". There were other options. I can think of a very simple
one that I would have taken.

