Tech Friday: Are you sharing your phone numbers on Facebook?
Posted By RichC on October 19, 2012
After receiving plenty of election oriented phone calls this year, it is time to purge all my phone numbers from the public roles … something I thought I had been doing for years — obviously not! An area overlooked my some is the increasingly popular way to share address and phone number data with contacts — Facebook. (phone number, addresses, etc are often updated automatically by iOS and Android phones)
Unfortunately, this is an area that should bit more private, but really isn’t. One would think that phone numbers added to a Facebook profile would be protected based on privacy settings — but think again. According to a recent CBSMoneyWatch article, Facebook is a go-to site for phone numbers and reverse-lookup information.
… the best way to look up someone based on a phone number right now is Facebook. That shouldn’t surprise anyone based on the service’s spotty privacy record, but in this case it certainly works to your advantage if you’re looking up a phone number. Just open Facebook and enter a phone number in the search box at the top of the screen, then press Enter. If that individual has associated their phone number with their Facebook profile, they will appear as the top search result, regardless of their privacy settings and even if you are not friends.
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