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by bpchaps 2484 days ago
Yes, you can get tons of personally identifiable information from things like public records laws and such. That's irrelevant, though. This is a phone number tied to a facebook account, not just their name.

A major difference here is the ability - at scale - to associate people with their facebook accounts. There are people who do not want to be associated with by their facebook account, and reasonably so. Not sure why you don't think that wouldn't be a big deal.
1 comments
paulddraper 2484 days ago
> There are people who do not want to be associated with by their facebook account

I figured that ever since Facebook instituted the "real name" policy, this isn't necessarily possible.

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jplayer01 2483 days ago
> I figured that ever since Facebook instituted the "real name" policy, this isn't necessarily possible.

Is this even enforced? I've had a fake name for years (and I have plenty of friends who've done the same).

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bpchaps 2483 days ago
Troll post? This would either imply that Facebook has 100% valid identity checks or that 100% of people are honest about their identity.
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paulddraper 2483 days ago
Or 100% of people are reported?

IDK how it works; I just know Facebook requires my real name.

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bpchaps 2483 days ago
You're suggesting that Facebook is 100% accurate in determining whether a name is real, or a pseudonym.

Imagine this: someone is on Facebook and wants to hide their identity for some reason. Best examples I can think of right now is teachers who don't want their profiles accessible to their students (because high schoolers can be little shits). Or someone trying to create a new life after domestic abuse. It makes full sense that they wouldn't want to give their full name so that they can't be found. Facebook isn't good enough in real name detection to get it right 100%. How could they?

With this sort of dump, a domestic abuser can much, much more easily find the person they abused, when that person was previously under a pseudonym.

This is just a small example. It gets much more complicated when considering how many millions of phone number:Facebook IDs were released.

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