Torrent or not, I want to see if any of my less tech-savvy friends are on the list so I can warn them even though I don't use Snapchat myself. It's much easier to convince them there's a real problem if I can say "Look, I can get your phone number and username from the Internet just like that" rather than explaining theoretical reasons why they're vulnerable.

Phone numbers are hardly private information.

Hmm, I somewhat disagree. Private information is anything you don't want public. By protocol, it isn't strictly private. But a phone number is private/unknown until its known, which is how most of us prefer it.

For example, in implicit social code it is impolite to give away a friend's phone number without asking them first.

The gray area for that is sharing a business phone number of your friend that they share widely through business cards or their website. Though typically it ends up being an email introduction if you really care to connect someone with your friend.

Seriously? Ever heard of whitepages.com?

I don't think whitepages has every name and phone number ever created

neither does snapchat

Yeah, but snapchat isn't suppose to give your number out.

Disagree. I suspect they would fall under personal data in the European Union under the Data Protection Directive.

indeed. rmc is right.

it's not that - resolving who people are across many services needs lots of fields of info. The more the better the accuracy of the algorithms that find the correlations.

Agreed. I get that a lot of these responses may be knee-jerk, but that doesn't excuse it.

leaking this data to the public could do more for us then ignoring it ;-)

>Why would you want this information? >Hacker News >Hacker

That's not really the definition of hacker in regards to hacker news.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

I'm implying that no real hacker sees such information as "off limits", especially when it's in such a readily, publicly available form.