Oh, no! My phone number was found on the Dark Web!

[dreamshark]

Gosh, I remember when my phone number was available to anybody with a phone book. Which was everybody with a phone. 

Man, that's a blast from the past. Remember phone books? 

Comments

[quadong]

As I will never tire of pointing out, it baffles me that people now think that phone numbers and home addresses are secrets that must be carefully guarded.

I mean, I guess there's been a real change in how phones work, so that part makes some little bit of sense. But considering your postal address to be a secret is what really confuses me.

[mdlbear]

You might want to reconsider that the next time you receive a death threat online. There have always been people who have a good reason for wanting an unlisted number.

[dreamshark]

Have you received death threats online? I certainly haven't. But I'm not a public figure of any kind and the only social media I use is this one, which doesn't attract a lot of attention.

There is certainly a difference between being doxed and simply being available. And yes, there have always been reasons to have unlisted numbers, which is why phone companies offered that service even in the days of phone books. But so far I don't seem to have suffered any harm from the presence of my publicly available contact information allegedly being "on the dark web."

Passwords and credit card numbers are more concerning, which is why I pay at least a little bit of attention to these dire warnings from that Experian service that I somehow got a free subscription to. So far, the only password that seems to be out there in DarkWebLand is the one that I use for situations when I don't see any need for a password at all, but I can't proceed without providing one.

[mdlbear]

Yes. Not recently, but it was disturbing. There have been more recent incidents among people close to me, including my housemate of a year ago.

Check on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see what information of yours has been revealed in data breaches; and https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords to check passwords.

Another reason to be cautious is the amount of spam, phishing, etc. these days -- Your address and phone number are public information, but if they're in a spammer's database they're much more likely to get used.

[minnehaha]

Paste a password into some random web site to see if it is in a data breach? Seems like a super dumb idea to me. Just change your passwords regularly.

K.

[mdlbear]

Read the docs on the site -- the protocol for checking is pretty secure. And the site has been around for several years and has a good reputation.

[quadong]

What Sharon said. I'm not denying that some people have reasons to hide their contact information, but most people's contact information doesn't need to be hidden, and is not hidden, even if they think it is. For instance, if you own a house, your address is available through the property records. If I type my name or Sharon's into whitepages.com, roughly correct information comes up (in my case, it's out of date, but will probably catch up soon), and that's not through anything nefarious. And I don't even own a house.

[mdlbear]

Voter records, also. Which is why my former housemate moved to a different state without telling me which one.

[quadong]

Um, ok, well, I have no idea what the situation between you and your ex-housemate was. I guess you didn't part on the best of terms. I hope that if they didn't want you to know where they went, you also didn't think you needed to know, in which case there's no further problem.

[mdlbear]

Not quite -- I was the one who didn't want to know where they went, so that they couldn't be found through me.

I'm way too easy to find -- I've been on the internet since before there was a world wide web, and long before the web had scary places in it.

[minnehaha]

How do you know your phone number was found on the Dark Web?

K.

[dreamshark]

For reasons I can't quite remember, I have a free subscription to Experian IdentityWorks, a credit monitoring service. Periodically they send me a detailed (and I do mean DETAILED) report on everything from an exhaustive credit history to a surprisingly long list of registered sex offenders in my neighborhood. I once spent several hours trudging through one of these and found nothing of note, so I haven't paid too much attention to further notifications from them. I'm hoping that if they find something that actually matters they will headline that in the email, but I am not sufficiently alarmed by the prospect of somebody knowing my phone number to pore over the report again. I probably should look at one of these reports again, but I haven't gotten up the energy to do so.

I also know that my least secure (and completely unimportant) password was apparently involved in some sort of data breach because Chrome keeps complaining about it when I use it.