Facebook still doesn’t offer an opt-out for findability by phone number

Facebook still allows users to be found by their phone number without allowing those users to disable it completely. A year ago, Facebook promised to turn off that feature.

The only options that users can set for being discoverable by phone number is ‘everyone, friends or friends of friends’. Twitter user Jeremy Burge noted the lack of an opt-out. The default for those who can search on the telephone number of the user has been set to ‘everyone’ for years and an opt-out has also been missing for some time.

A year ago, however, Facebook seemed to promise to disable the search function, because it was being abused. Malicious persons used the function to link telephone numbers to other personal data on a large scale and thus commit fraud.

“Given the scale and complexity of the activity we’ve seen, we believe that most individuals could have their public profiles scraped this way, so we’ve disabled this feature for now,” Facebook reported in April 2018. “Until today. people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into the Facebook search to help find them,” the company wrote at the time.

It seems that Facebook has not completely disabled the feature, but only prevents the user’s profile from being shown when the number is entered via the search function. The faq about the feature states: “With the settings under ‘Who can look me up?’ You control how others can use your mobile phone number and email address to look up you in other ways, such as when someone uploads your contact information to Facebook from a mobile phone.” It is not known which ‘other ways’ there are to search by telephone number.

Burge emphasizes that for years Facebook has been encouraging its users to add phone numbers to their accounts for security reasons. Since September last year, Facebook has reported in the notification for adding phone numbers that it is used for more than just security.

In September 2018, Gizmodo also reported that an investigation revealed that Facebook uses phone numbers for advertising purposes. Four months earlier, Facebook made a change that allowed users to enable two-factor authentication without entering a phone number. At the time, Facebook’s spokesperson indicated that users can choose that option if they have trouble using their phone number for advertisements.