Convince me why I should be!
People are saying you shouldn’t put a number in there because if it’s not already in there, you are leaking some kind of privileged information.
That’s not true.
So putting your phone into a website also ties it to your identity.
no problemo
What's the worst they can do with it? Call me all hours of the day trying to sell me an extended factory warranty for my free Medicare brace that, by the way, has a Security Number that is under arrest by the Security Administration because it made fraudulent IRS payments with iTunes gift cards to lower my student loan payments because I didn't listen when Microsoft called about my Windows Virus?
Oh, wait, sorry, it hung up on me after dialing because their call center was full. Even if they answer, they just won't play anymore - as soon as they think you might be messing with them (or just aren't going to buy whatever they're selling), they hang up. Twenty years ago, you could have an hour long conversation with the credit card people if you were bored...
Even with spam blockers in place, that sort of garbage is the bulk of the calls my phones get. At least for my personal phone, I live in a different area code from where the phone is (insert XKCD about your area code being where you lived in 2002), so anything that's my phone's area code and not in my contact list is clearly unwelcome.
Phone numbers just aren't a large space to randomly dial looking for valid numbers if you're on a scum VOIP gateway, and clearly the scammers and spammers already have lists of what might be worth calling.
In a world where
your bank thinks that SMS is good enough for 2FA...
phone number plus other info is good enough for credit reporting agencies to send out your complete file...
Variations of this theme.
Also, this dump is once more confirmation that Facebook owns lots of data about its users, and doesn't care to protect that data, or to give its users the ability to control personal information. Why should they care? They suffer no consequences for this lack.
I found FastPeopleSearch.com, which not only had my current phone number and physical address, but my previous cell phone number, land lines (from back when those were a thing), my Vonage phone number, and previous addresses, all dating about 20 years. If you know my name, you can get a lot more... thanks to these aggregators of public records.
You can attempt to have yourself removed but there are a lot of these types of sites.
Of course, if you take "a" phone number, and use the google search technique, you'll find one of those sites like FastPeopleSearch and learn a lot more about who the phone number belongs to. But presumably anyone who's trying to make use of all this information could do all that without the Facebook breach, if they automate the process.
Of course, the Facebook breach ties a bunch of information to a phone number in a, perhaps, tidy package?
And, certainly, Facebook suffers no consequences. A while back, some people noticed that if a company was in the news for a catastrophic data breech, their stock tended to climb immediately afterwards. No such thing as bad press coverage, at least in the age of the trading algorithms!
https://www.thenewseachday.com/private-facebook-phone-number...
If you don't want your phone number leaked don't hand it over to a random website that pinky swears it won't keep it. It's maybe not a scam, but still...