LOGIC💣

This reminds me of how police abuse any new tool they’re given.

Like how while trained dogs can actually sniff out drugs, when they’re given to police, they get retrained to simply alert whenever the police want them to, and essentially become a flimsy reason to let police violate your rights and search anybody they want to.

And the police suffer zero repercussions for their actions. If they don’t find drugs, there’s nobody who’s going to take them to court and force them to retrain their dogs or to disallow drug dogs from being used as reasonable suspicion.

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.

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.

The reason you have a spare is because you might need it in the future.

People seem to think that “spare” means that it’s useless, but it’s exactly the opposite. It’s “spare” because it’s useful to you. So it’s strange that people think you would give something away just because it’s “spare,” because that just means you’d have to acquire another spare for yourself.

Would you give away the spare tire for your car just because somebody asked you for it?