Submitted 1 month ago by Agent641@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
What are the chances this will lead to online data privacy reform and corporate accountability for PII for all? or just…some?
This is HORRIBLE! That RICH people’s Information was Leaked! This needs to be PUNISHED BY DEATH so they Learn to ONLY leak POOR People’s information!
It’s kinda funny how times change.
In Germany, it even used to be that your phone number, along with your name and address, was published in the phone book, by law. If you wanted to be delisted, you had to provide a valid reason, such as being stalked. Just because was not good enough. At every street corner was a phone booth with the phone book of your town with your name and address. At post offices, you could find phone books from other towns. (The phone system was run by the postal service, which was a government agency.)
Phone books were a bit of a plot point in Terminator. The terminator gets the list of Connors from the phone book and kills them in that order.
One thing that never got digitized and put on the internet was the phone book. And for damn good reason.
Yes it did. Data brokers are a thing. They sell your information to anyone they want and aren’t responsible for anything that happens.
I doubt there’s anywhere where the phone book wasn’t digitized. In Germany, the requirement to publish your address + number was eventually dropped, though; maybe because the phone system was privatized.
It’s really the phone companies’ fault for stagnating instead of innovating.
There is no reason at this point for most people to have phone numbers at all. We have the technology today to throw the whole concept out the window.
Replace it with something where a stranger couldn’t guess how to contact a random person. Replace it with something where third parties can’t easily share your contact info.
You could even have both technologies at the same time to help transition. And we do, as users, but we still need phone numbers because our carriers don’t give us multiple options directly.
Phone numbers are based on requirements for a system that’s almost 150 years old now. Back when the numbers really meant locations and before people realized how easy it could be exploited to steal old people’s retirement money.
You still have to have some kind of unique identifier. What do you propose phone numbers are replaced with because I can’t think of anything that isn’t basically just the same but with a different flavour or actually is actively worse.
Your device and account credentials are unique enough to identify you on the carrier-level. Ultimately, every time you share your contact info, it should be a unique code (QR would be convenient enough) generated by your cell provider. If it’s ever leaked, you just notify your carrier to burn it, and give the contact a new unique code. No two people should be given the same contact, and all of the contacts are simply correlated to your device by the carrier. Additionally, when sharing contacts via QR, they could be modified on the device-level to include e2e encryption keys, thus further securing the transmitted information, not at the trust-me-bro carrier level, but at the user-verifiable device level. If the carrier gets hacked, reset the identifiers, associate the new one in your text app to keep conversations going, and move on like nothing happened. You’ll still be better off than if your phone number was leaked. It’s not perfect, but it’d be a hell of a lot more secure than what we have now.
In other words: What if a billion dollar company made Signal, but with cell towers, and not as good?
Sure you can have a unique identifier. That’s not the issue. The issue is that anyone can contact you via your phone number! This is not a problem with chat apps where people need permission to add you to their contact list. Why not have a system like that?
Same goes for credit cards. They should need to ask for permission to charge your credit card. Merely knowing your credit card info should not be enough.
As today if I give you a phone number you have no idea who is the owner if you don’t look up on some service.
It will not change if instead of the phone number we use the IMEI or a UUID, somewhere you need to have a link between the owner and the something, if nothing else in your phone and at the phone company.
Phone numbers are the equivalent of IP addresses. It’s just that the accompanying DNS solutions are pretty badly broken and the firewall options are all iffy.
Would you care to describe how you would implement said system? Because I can’t see how that would work technologically
I intentionally was vague because there are many possible existing ways to accomplish each thing I said, and it is up to the phone company to innovate.
The simplest way to keep people from guessing phone numbers is to make them very long and sparse. If an autodialer had to dial 1000 invalid numbers before finding a valid number, it would make the endeavor that much harder. This is just a convenient example because the cryptography equivalent is harder to explain, but you could make contact info so hard to guess that it would be basically impossible.
Probably the easiest way to explain how to keep people from passing contact info is to imagine a two step process like facebook has. If I pass your facebook username to someone else, they don’t automatically become your friend. The cryptographic equivalent would involve a chain of trust, but again, harder to explain.
Why do we still still use phone numbers for communication? It’s a terrible idea. One unifying piece of information that if anyone gets they can use. Bah.
We should have a communication method that both sides consent to before allowing the connection. Either side can kill that connection at any time by revoking permission on either side. The contact info shouldn’t be the same for everyone either, but something ephemeral instead. Unique. A burner phone number that’s different to each person and only useful if the connection originates from the one meant to have that number.
It’s 2025. We still have “you have been hacked, give me gift cards to save your Google Chrome” style shit going on.
867-5309
Federal political sources downplayed the seriousness of the issue, believing the issue was not related to a data leak or breach.
Sources noted the private contact information for politicians was often already widely available and known by stakeholders and members of the public they had interacted with. Some pointed out that politicians often kept the same contact details for years, from when they were more junior politicians who freely distributed their numbers on public documents like press releases or community announcements.
What’s the number? So I can make sure I don’t accidentally send him a text…
I need someone where to send me the number so I can make sure I don’t accidentally send him a message saying cunt
SnoringEarthworm@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
New punishments for hacking politicians’ phones.
Zero changes for anyone else.
stefenauris@pawb.social 1 month ago
hate to say it but you’re probably right
Australis13@fedia.io 1 month ago
Probably right on the money, sadly.