I have been noticing this more and more lately and it has finally bothered me enough to cause me to want to write about it. What i’m talking about is the insane number of groups that are springing up, almost every day on Facebook, started by people who have broken or lost their cell phones and would like to collect all of their friends numbers again. These groups, which usually show up in my feed are generally always open to anyone on Facebook and usually contain at least 20-50 cell phone numbers EACH. So my question to all of you; ARE YOU CRAZY? Maybe some of you do not realize the consequences of what I just said and what is taking place here….so lets review:
- Wide open Facebook GROUPS
- Full of thousands upon thousands of numbers!
This means, for those of you posting your numbers to these groups, that you are placing your cell number in a public place for a couple hundred thousand people to find, read, and use as they wish. Not only does this open you up to some probably pretty humorous yet annoying prank phone calls, but it also gives anyone the option to call you up and use some simple social engineering techniques (they know your number, so you must know them somehow, right?) to obtain even more information about you which they can then use to steal your identity. I am just simply amazed at how many people fail to realize this and just go around posting their number to these groups without a second thought. Just to see how many numbers I could acquire this way, I did a search of groups on Facebook with the search terms “broken phone”. The result of this was 500+ groups. I clicked down through the first 10 results, and in just those first 10 results, I could have obtained over 200 phone numbers of complete strangers (I didn’t because I have no interest in calling these people). This is just in the first 10 groups! Imagine how many possible numbers that is in the entire 500+ groups that are available. The worst part of all is the fact that these groups can easily be closed so that only the friends you’re inviting to it can see the contents of the wall, sadly not very many of you do this.
It’s sad, but at the same time I have to laugh at how incredibly stupid people really are sometimes. What makes it even better is that probably half the people that join these groups and post their numbers, are the same people who cried foul when Facebook introduced new features like the feed and mini-feed because their privacy was being violated. If you don’t want your privacy violated, think before you act! Don’t post your phone number in public groups!
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