![]() Information about a property I previously owned, including its square footage and the mortgage taken out on it. My past phone numbers, including the landline for my parents’ home. The full names of my mother, father, sister and aunt. My current home address, its square footage, the cost of the property and the taxes I pay on it. He then did a thorough web search and followed a data trail - linking my name and address to information in other online background-checking tools and public records - to track down more details. Tezisci, the researcher, had to do was plug my number into White Pages Premium, an online database that charges $5 a month for access to public records. It took only an hour for my cellphone number to expose my life.Īll that Mr. But in most cases, the potential dangers and annoyances of handing out your number outweigh the benefits, as you will read below. In some situations, giving your digits to institutions like your bank provides an extra layer of security. He and the other researchers at Fyde opted not to do so, since such attacks are illegal. Or he could have targeted my family and me with sophisticated phishing attacks. Tezisci could have used that information to try to answer security questions to break into my online accounts. Soon, he had a full dossier on me - including my name and birth date, my address, the property taxes I pay and the names of members of my family.įrom there, it could have easily gotten worse. He quickly plugged my cellphone number into a public records directory. I recently found this out firsthand when I asked Fyde, a mobile security firm in Palo Alto, Calif., to use my digits to demonstrate the potential risks of sharing a phone number.Įmre Tezisci, a security researcher at Fyde with a background in telecommunications, took on the task with gusto. In fact, your phone number may have now become an even stronger identifier than your full name. And it can lead to information from our offline worlds, including where we live and more. It does not store any personal data.At the same time, the string of digits has increasingly become connected to apps and online services that are hooked into our personal lives. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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