What are the chances this will lead to online data privacy reform and corporate accountability for PII for all? or just…some?
New punishments for hacking politicians’ phones.
Zero changes for anyone else.
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.
I’m speaking of my experiences in the United States. Here, phone books tend to be separated into white pages and yellow pages. The white pages listed names, addresses and phone numbers of private lines, usually homes, and the yellow pages listed businesses. Taking out a listing in the yellow pages was the SEO of its day.
When the internet happened, the one thing that never really happened was a freely searchable database of the white pages. One thing the internet was never useful for as an upstanding citizen was looking up personal phone numbers.
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.
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.
I love cryptography! Technical explanation please.
Still not seeing how it would work. You’re dropping random bits of the system and saying it would work but it’s too complicated for you to explain, so there’s really nothing to discuss.
not op but signal has basically solved this. users are not just randomly accessible by anyone. they can share a long URL that contains an ID, or make a short username they like and pass around to people. and even then the recipient has to accept being contacted by each other user
true that signal now relies on the phone number system for trust and safety, but that’s not core to how signal works, it could be replaced if they really wanted.
At that point, you (well, not you per se) are basically suggesting to replace the telephone system with a Signal-esque system. Which would break a billion things in real life, for little to no gain.
any change would break a billion things in real life, so we could at least have a proper replacement.
the problem with signal here is that it’s centralized, probably couldn’t even handle the load besides other problems. but that’s solvable, like look at simplex which is similar
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.
This sounds cool! Reminds me of SSH keys a bit!
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…
