Do HN readers know you can buy lists of millions of people's names and phone numbers from companies whose sole purpose is collecting them, like infogroup?
Yes, you can get tons of personally identifiable information from things like public records laws and such. That's irrelevant, though. This is a phone number tied to a facebook account, not just their name.
A major difference here is the ability - at scale - to associate people with their facebook accounts. There are people who do not want to be associated with by their facebook account, and reasonably so. Not sure why you don't think that wouldn't be a big deal.
You're suggesting that Facebook is 100% accurate in determining whether a name is real, or a pseudonym.
Imagine this: someone is on Facebook and wants to hide their identity for some reason. Best examples I can think of right now is teachers who don't want their profiles accessible to their students (because high schoolers can be little shits). Or someone trying to create a new life after domestic abuse. It makes full sense that they wouldn't want to give their full name so that they can't be found. Facebook isn't good enough in real name detection to get it right 100%. How could they?
With this sort of dump, a domestic abuser can much, much more easily find the person they abused, when that person was previously under a pseudonym.
This is just a small example. It gets much more complicated when considering how many millions of phone number:Facebook IDs were released.
depends on the jurisdiction. In Germany this is a grey area or outright forbidden depending on the case, and this dump apparently contains numbers from numerous jurisdictions.
Also, needlessly to say someone who gives facebook their phone number for verification purposes does likely not expect that the data is leaked or sold without their permission.
> needlessly to say someone who gives facebook their phone number for verification purposes does likely not expect that the data is leaked or sold without their permission.
Sadly, this isn't the case anymore. People absolutely expect companies to sell or leak every last bit of PII data they have on all their customers now.
Do HN readers know you can buy lists of millions of people's names and phone numbers from companies whose sole purpose is collecting them, like infogroup?