there's no "actual phone lookup platform" you can't get a person's location by knowing their phone number, that's a huge privacy violation. You can get the location of your own phone via icloud or google's system for android. You could also install an app on your phone to track your phone's location. You cannot find people based on knowing their phone number, that would be a serious safety issue for you know people trying to not, for example, get murdered by their ex-boyfriends.

What about phone numbers corresponding to a specific location?

it's been reported numerous times that you can buy real-time cell phone location data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20506624, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32143256. you might need a little more info than just a phone number, but (allegedly) not that much more.

There’s no public one. But, data brokers have this info, and share it. Internally, a lot of companies can do this. So, it’s not far-fetched.

Doing that for an open-ended phone number anywhere in the world seems like somebody's full time job to maintain. You'd probably need some database that ties together disparate data sources. Confidence in accuracy probably varies. The best source to use probably also changes.

I feel like somebody googling for a quick code snippet to do that in a single POST request should be aware of how challenging the problem space is. That would be a hint for joe random developer that they've come up with a bad idea and should work on something else. But I probably expect too much.

Are you saying it's routine for cell phone companies to sell live fine location data to the highest bidder? Can I get a source on that? Horrifying if true, enough to make me switch back to landlines.

Back in 2008 I was working with a company in the UK that had an API to do this with O2. It only provided a rough area of where the user was, as it was based on which (single) cell tower the user was connected to.

I'd imagine today MIMO data is good enough to triangulate a very accurate (metres) position.

5G MIMO is sub millimetre 3D accurate to microsecond timing given a good tower time reference.

I've heard anecdotes about this for a while. Here are a few:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunte...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/t-mobile-sprint-...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/6/18214667/att-t-mobile-spri...

Here is a Last Week Tonight piece on the topic in addition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA

Reverse phone number lookup usually refers to finding a residential/business address tied to a phone number (historically a landline phone, but cell phones are also owned by people who have addresses), not the literal GPS location of the phone.

I think white pages are still a thing, no?

For the young 'uns - the white pages were part of the physical phone book in every city. You got a new phone book delivered to your doorstep each year for free. Yellow pages listed the phone numbers of every business, white pages listed the phone numbers of the residents.

The crazy part is: almost everyone added their numbers voluntarily to the white pages, because you wanted people to be able to easily find and reach you.

> The crazy part is: almost everyone added their numbers voluntarily to the white pages, because you wanted people to be able to easily find and reach you.

The default was that your number would be in the phone book, it was not voluntary. If you wanted an unlisted number, you had to pay for it.

This is even crazier.

For reference: I'm old enough to remember using landlines and white pages, but not old enough to have ever had a landline at my own address.

I moved to San Francisco in 1999, my early 20s, and got a landline. Cell phones were not yet the norm, and I really didn’t have much interest in having one until a girlfriend of mine insisted I get one in 2000.

If I remember correctly, Pac Bell had a “opt in” white pages phone number removal which was not charged, but my parents just a few years prior had to pay for theirs with Pac Bell.

You would have to be like <15 to not remember landlines.

> I think white pages are still a thing, no?

Rural NY; yes. I've gotten a very, VERY thin White/Yellow Pages in the past year. Barely anybody in the White Pages section, a majority of it is Yellow Pages and a majority of that is nearly full-page ads for national services, not local providers.

Yea, I think this "want" is pointing to the massive tsunami of spammer/scammer script kiddies that ChatGPT is enabling.

Don't tell Whitepages

https://www.whitepages.com/reverse-phone

> Whitepages free reverse phone lookup service allows you to enter a phone number and quickly find out who called you. Find the phone owner's full name, address, and more.

[snip]

> Anyone can do a reverse lookup to identify cell phone, residential, and business numbers for free.

That, or you could get a normal white pages and process it using some sort of data processing tool... nah, that's science fiction.

The service doesn't seem to work very well at doing what it says, but that's not the important part. The important part is that what ChatGPT is describing is being able look up the current location of a cellphone, not the owner's address.

That is widely known about and freely available to the public, maybe. There are multiple options available for pseudo-LE types with relatively lax access prerequisites.

https://www.robertxiao.ca/hacking/locationsmart/ is an example of one provider's public demo (requiring only a phone number) being used to provide non-consensual location data.

I know a sketchy resporg that used locationsmart, there's a "consent" bit but it's basically honor system

Yeah only the government can do that.

> actual phone lookup platform

uh, you mean stalker / scammer platform? This would be a major privacy violation.

That ship sailed a long time ago. Any major search engine will provide this service. I entered both of my primary phone numbers and my name (and location) was in the first hit.

Sometimes you people are way too online and think the rest of the world is with you there.

In the US, it doesn’t matter if you are online or not. Data brokers are and they are publishing your info.

Twilio's API has this functionality. I've mostly used it to identify scammers using VOIP or phone numbers I don't recognize - it usually returns nothing but network info, but sometimes it'll return the account owner's name if it's a cellular (and landline maybe)

https://www.twilio.com/docs/lookup

Another suggestion: put something like libphonenumber’s isPossibleNumber or isValidNumber on your server, on error run the query string through it. If it says that looks like a phone number, relay this information in the error response. A field in the JSON response like “info: Your query parameter looks like a phone number. If you are trying to get the geographical location of a phone from the phone number, please be aware this is not possible. [link to blogpost]” would hopefully jump out at people, particularly if you ask them to include the error response in their support request.

It’s an unprincipled hack, a bizarre dependency to add to your project, it probably feels like admitting defeat to the all powerful AI… but it does 90%-solve the problem.

yeah I think maybe the way to solve this is to add some kind of API documentation that explicitly mentions that phone lookups aren't possible. ChatGPT will parse it eventually...

Is ChatGPT so advanced that it just predicted the future? The thought experiment with this is trippy.

It just predicts what a statistically "normal" person is likely to say right now, not in the future. The article even mentions there's an YouTube video that explains how to use this (non existent) feature already.

ChatGPT as a hyperstitious agent is the worst possible future and I'm here for it.

Or have the API automatically return the GPS coordinates of famous brothels around the world.

Maybe they gave a simplified explanation of their service, but if all they do is parse the country code of a phone number to return the geocoordinates for the center of that country then maybe just deprecate phone number inputs. I can’t think of why that’d be actual useful (a function that accepts a phone number country code and returns the center of the country’s geocoordinates) but if they have customers who use it direct them to input the country code directly

My understanding is that the original issue was the YouTube tutorials used some other service to convert the country code of a phone number into a string of the country’s name and submitted just the country’s name, getting back a valid but useless geolocation. This new problem with ChatGPT is that it just writes code that submits a phone number to an api that expects a latitude and longitude and it explodes right away. I don’t think at any point the api had a call that accepts a phone number.

They don't do anything with phone numbers. You can give them lat/lng coordinates and get the address, or an address and get the coordinates.

So "7 Carmine St, New York, NY 10014" will return "(40.7305290, -74.0020706)" and vice versa.

There are youtube tutorials claiming you can do phone lookups using their service. What these youtube tutorials really do is use some other library to determine the country name from the phone number. Then they call the OpenCage geolocation API with the country name as the address input.

Obvious suggestion: don't keep writing blog posts that mention your company name and the phrase "phone lookup service," which ChatGPT may get trained on in the future.