Hisham Sarwar
In a recent episode of privacy compromise, Tech Crunch has highlighted that Facebook does not let you opt out of its phone number lookup settings.
Users are complaining that two-factor authentication introduced by Facebook that uses phone number associated with their profile, other people can look-up their profile using the number provided for two-factor authentication.
It was only last year when Facebook admitted that it introduced users to the targeted ads using their phone numbers. Now the new concern surfacing internet is, users are finding out how Facebook default settings allow everybody to look-up a user profile with a number.
For years Facebook claimed the adding a phone number for 2FA was only for security. Now it can be searched and there’s no way to disable that. pic.twitter.com/zpYhuwADMS
— Jeremy Burge 🐥🧿 (@jeremyburge) March 1, 2019
How can you avoid your profile look-up for the public?
This tweet will solve the problem. By default, the settings are set to Public but you need to change it to friends in order to be safe on Facebook.
See thread! Using security to further weaken privacy is a lousy move—especially since phone numbers can be hijacked to weaken security. Putting people at risk. What say you @facebook? https://t.co/9qKtTodkRD
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) March 2, 2019
