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what do companies do with your phone number ?
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this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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How do you combat this sort of thing? Besides periodically changing your phone number, of course
Obviously, never enter your real number in a web form unless the service depends on you getting called back ... in which case you likely would have called the company by phone anyway.
This is not possible.
Most services that require a phone number also verify it via sms.
Additionally they check so that each number can only be used once, disabling most free sms receivers online.
Yep. I've tried using dummy numbers in the past for things where no phone contact is required for contact and it frequently triggers fraud prevention even if not rendered useless by sms verification before submission.
Oh, i never experienced this. My thought is rather, "nobody will call anyway" ... that said, perhaps it's because i'm largely living outside of online buseness. Location: Europe mostly. What busenesses are you talking about, out of interest?
they're talking about sites like Facebook or Google
I tried random numbers and internet numbers with Openai, Wolt and Revolut.
They were all rejected
If you might ever need to be reached at the number being shared there's always the route of VoIP products like Google Voice (free), or Twilio or MySudo (not free), where one can create virtual numbers for different use cases. In general it's more secure to share a VoIP number anyway since it isn't vulnerable to the same SIM swapping attacks that cell numbers are. I don't know that it's possible to create a Google Voice account without providing a real cell #. One could probably get around that with a burner phone.
Where there is only a short-term need for a reachable number for SMS verification or communication purposes there are services that provide temporary SMS numbers, like mobilesms.io. Because these numbers are recycled frequently, definitely don't use them to register anything important like a bank account or email address.
A lot of services actively disable VoIP numbers from being used for registration or submission.