February 11, 2023
I read the article published the other week week, "Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It," by Brian X. Chen in The New York Times to be informative and persuasive on the importance of being cautious about sharing one's email address. If you haven't read it yet, check out the link.
Consumers now have options, such as Apple's Hide My Email Address and Mozilla's Firefox Relay, to address the issue of email tracking. That's great, but we still have a major issue - Phone Numbers. Everyone and their mother is asking for it alongside your email address. Haircut down the street using their online portal? Phone Number. Order food online? Phone number, please. It's everywhere.
Don't listen to the service when they ask for the phone number for back up, security, or however they're persuading you to enter those digits, as it's extremely insecure.
Sure, there could be valid reasons to ask for a phone number. While a service may justify requesting your phone number for text updates on shipping or appointments, it should not be a requirement for registration if you do not wish to receive them. Now, my phone number is linked to whatever other data was provided to the service, and depending on how they do business, they might be selling all that data to the next application down the street who will combine it with whatever they have gathered, and repeat.
Then, there's a data leak of that application, because, you know, there's almost zero market incentive for them to protect their data and government surely isn't doing much to enforce protection of data in most markets. So, this application you gave your number to is caught up in the rotating data breaches of the week. Whoops! Your phone number with who knows what else is attached to it is out online and searchable for anyone to see. It's not an email address, I can't just change it in a day with all the services I use. It's my phone number, I'll have to reach out to my cellular provider, friends, family, and services I use to proactively communicate the change. It's a mess.
Unlike email privacy protection services listed earlier, there isn't a solution that exists to generate a unique phone number that I can give to each service to point to my real phone number. There are some getting close though that do cost some money and provide a few alternate phone numbers. Better than nothing.
This is not just limited to email and phone numbers, but applies to all personal information shared with any service. Data in combination, or in some cases, standalone, can be used to track you. So, next time you sign up for that new app, think twice.