Google shared my phone number

https://danq.me/2025/05/21/google-shared-my-phone-number/

by luu • 1 year ago

471 173 1 year ago

hn87262• 1 year ago

Or one of the users helpfully updated the business profile with the phone number, since they had it and thought it might be useful for some

mattigames• 1 year ago

Random users can update business profile numbers and Google publishes them without asking the number's owner for permission? Seems like a huge oversight.

mcv• 1 year ago

Also a nice opportunity to steal a company's business.

Didn't some food delivery service get their own phone numbers listed for various restaurants a few years ago?

onli2• 1 year ago

Not an oversight, illegal publishing of PI obtained without permission.

ferngodfather3• 1 year ago

If the owner isn't registered with Google business, yes. Other users (local guides) are asked to confirm the change.

If they are registered, the request goes to the business owner to approve in my experience. We used to get lots of phantom requests telling us our opening hours had changed but if you're registered you can just decline them.

strogonoff2• 1 year ago

You’d think users can update business information on Google Maps. Instead, most of the times when you correct, say, working hours, it just gets rejected by the business owner who wants people to keep traveling there in the evening just to be turned away or see the closed doors because their staff goes home early every day.

varun_ch• 1 year ago

There’s a (somewhat dramatic) TED talk about this oversight from a few years ago: https://youtu.be/5c6AADI7Pb4

yencabulator• 1 year ago

You can also change the address of a business, or mark them closed.

bilekas• 1 year ago

Well in the screenshot it clearly states : "Your phone number was Updated by Google."

That doesn't really sound like it was any users input.

pinoy420• 1 year ago

That is what it says when you do it though.

hn87262• 1 year ago

I think that's what it always says — even when the business owners submits a change it's just a request, and the actual update is — technically — done by Google.

tomlockwood2• 1 year ago

I've been narrowing my eyes at the "add your phone number/backup email" thing for a while now because it seems like a transparent and deceitful attempt to increase the reach of the FB/Google "cross device graph". So seedy.

latchkey2• 1 year ago

Oh it totally is, ignore it and don't ever add your phone as "backup".

johnisgood4• 1 year ago

Of course. That said some (increasing number of) places do require phone number verification.

josephcsible• 1 year ago

You're lucky if you can do that. Occasionally, when you try to log in to your Google account, it will demand a phone number before it lets you in.

kalaksi• 1 year ago

Many years ago, Facebook started to ask for phone number for "security reasons" and so that you wouldn't "lose access to your account". They emphasized that the number wouldn't be used for anything else. I never gave it, and nowadays don't even have an account, and wasn't surprised when it was later revealed that they were lying.

gblargg• 1 year ago

It's part of the know your customer (KYC) push, which is likely for this cross-device graph side benefit in many cases.

profsummergig2• 1 year ago

And these days everything is 2FA. All that phone data is going to start leaking when they need to growth-hack further.

username223• 1 year ago

Same. I never trusted tech companies not to use my cell number in shady ways, and wasn't surprised when it came out the first few times that they were using 2FA numbers for other purposes. Long random passwords and throwaway email addresses have been good enough for me.

sschueller• 1 year ago

Google published my private cell phone number in the play store as after spending over a month trying to get my business number verified under the threat of account termination I ran out of options.

brisky• 1 year ago

Similar situation - I was an independent app publisher on app store, but I don't feel comfortable publishing my phone number next to my apps. I don't do customer support. This punishes indie app devs. After I saw this requirement I decided to remove my app from the app store.

surfingdino2• 1 year ago

Nobody at those big corps has any control of or time to pause to think over the effects of their actions.

Brajeshwar• 1 year ago

I've long back realized that it is not just the big corps, but every employee of a company, after a while began to think everything outwards. Their focus, the work, they playbook always from them. There are only a very few that things from outside.

During my consultation, the team I was helping keep talking about "Our App", "Our Process", "Our Use", "How do we get this data into our System?" I had to ask them multiple times, "How does your users or customers outside of your company uses them?" "Have you thought of how people usually do these kind of steps?"

surfingdino2• 1 year ago

Exactly. That's their default mode of thinking.

jmkni• 1 year ago

FYI it's blurred out in the screenshot but I feel like I can still make it out

threeducks• 1 year ago

Definitely readable. A stronger blur would not have helped the situation either. It is absolutely insane how well information from a blurred image can be reconstructed. For example, consider the "Data" column of the following image, which basically looks like a gray image without any content, but neural networks can recover most of the blurred characters: https://fips.fi/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/HDC_result_exampl...

lostlogin• 1 year ago

The person who posted it has said elsewhere here that the number is faked.

And yes, your comments re blur have plenty of precedent.

lo0dot02• 1 year ago

Algorithms can see the difference between RGB 245, 245, 245 and RGB 246, 245, 245 (it's 1, 0, 0) but the eye can probably not, also depending on the monitor hardware. Thus the blurring effect might not be as strong as it looks like at first glance.

kgeist• 1 year ago

I heard new AI crawlers extract text from images too, hoping to get that extra dataset. So with that kind of blur, it might end up in LLMs.

Dan-Q14• 1 year ago

Blog owner here. You're welcome to unblur it: I swapped the number out in the screenshot for one of Ofcom's list of official never-to-be-assigned telephone numbers for drama (e.g. film & TV) use (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/...) before I applied the blur.

That number isn't mine, and will never belong to anybody!

saretup2• 1 year ago

Then why bother to blur it?

kotaKat• 1 year ago

Ahhh, that's a cheeky move :)

Love it.

mstkllah• 1 year ago

It looks like it's a fake number anyway as it's 07700 987654

hnlmorg• 1 year ago

There are computer techniques that can be used to de-blur sensitive information, so the expert advice is not to use simple blurring effects.

But in this instance, it’s trivially easy to read the numbers even without any fancy software.

@author, if your reason for blurring was to protect your identity, then you should update that image asap because you’re not succeeding at hiding your number.

aydgn• 1 year ago

Anyone using Google Search can edit a business's phone number. Weird, but true.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Three+Rings+CIC&hl=en#irp=ph

AStonesThrow3• 1 year ago

Anyone with a Google Account who uses Google Maps can submit edit suggestions, but they are all reviewed before publication. You can inform them if the business doesn't exist, has a different address, new website, existing website doesn't work, new business hours; all sorts of things. Not limited to businesses: includes bus stops and train stations, historic landmarks, basically anything where you can drop a pin and see a database entry.

This is probably linked to the process for Search. It's called "crowdsourcing".

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038311

The article mentions having control of the Google Business Profile. It was sometimes called "Google My Business". You can register and verify that you're the owner, and then you'll have tools to reply to reviews and manage your own Maps entry, etc.

https://business.google.com/us/business-profile/

danpalmer4• 1 year ago

I do this quite a lot, most get accepted, some don't. It typically takes a few days to get reviewed and published.

cookiengineer3• 1 year ago

This is what happens when Google isn't sue-able by private entities.

In Germany, lieferando (subsidiary of takeaway.com) registers domains in the form of restaurantname-city.de, points them to their lieferando cloudflare account, and claims ownership for the google business entry where they set the phone number to their own call center.

Then they call the business owner and _force them_ to sign the contract with them, because effectively the owner knows they cannot be found anymore via google, and everyone that wants to order something will reach the call center hotline and leave a negative review after the hotline tells them wrong number, effectively destroying their business. And the people working for lieferando via Zeitarbeitsfirmen know this, and mention this in the call to pressure the restaurant owners to get their sales provision.

Crimeflare before it got taken down had around 130k domains that were pointing to the lieferando website using this kind of scheme, I helped provide the dataset for a couple of local business owners that were extorted this way and refused to abide by that scheme.

Guess what happened, nobody could be sued and the financial damages were too small to escalate it on the European court level. Sadly, class-action lawsuits don't work the same way as in the US, apparently.

Effectively Google does not abide by the laws and gets away with it due to their financial structures of their holding companies.

And they certainly know about this, they just don't give a single fvck.

mikae1• 1 year ago

Geez. Has there been any good write-ups about this in the German press?

cookiengineer3• 1 year ago

At the time we didn't know how large the scheme is, because you only find out effectively about those domains if you let your own root/resolver running and listen for the A/AAAA entries coming from cloudflare.

So the real number of those domains is likely to be much much larger if you would have the same dataset like crimeflare had. You can find articles about it with the keyword "Schattenwebsites lieferando" because that's what the press seems to have settled on. Different press teams counted different amount of websites because of that. Another team where I knew people from the CCC that helped them confirmed the 120k number though.

Our final number in Q4 of 2021 was 130k domains that we found out about, and we were trying to contact a bunch of other business owners to be able to escalate the lawsuit onto the Landsgerichtsebene (so that it can go into the Bundesgerichtshofsebene afterwards, and then to the EU court).

[1] https://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/lieferando-lockt-kundschaft-...

[2] https://notizlo.ch/wie-man-gegen-lieferando-domains-arbeitet...

[3] https://t3n.de/news/lieferando-restaurants-schattenwebsites-...

[4] https://www.trendingtopics.eu/lieferando-provisionszahlungen...

[5] https://www.deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag/schattenwebseiten...

iakov• 1 year ago

That sounds absolutely insane. Doesn't Google have any way to dispute the business ownership? Can I take over any business on the maps by just registering a domain that contains the business name?

mschuster912• 1 year ago

Can I take over any business on the maps by just registering a domain that contains the business name?

yes, as long as the business doesn't have that already. And that's the point - many small restaurants, takeaways etc simply don't have a website because they think they don't need one, until they're fucked by Lieferando.

vineyardmike3• 1 year ago

That sounds absolutely insane.

It is absolutely insane that organizations are weaponizing this.

Doesn't Google have any way to dispute the business ownership?

I can only speak for the US and it’s been a few years since I’ve done it, but yes Google does have a way. You can report an issue, and “claim” a business. Google will literally send a postcard with a unique ID to the registered physical address, and whoever gets that postcard can take ownership.

Can I take over any business on the maps by just registering a domain that contains the business name?

Absolutely not (at least legally I assume). It’s probably trademark infringement and potentially fraud to misrepresent that business, and also Google has other methods to verify ownership (see above).

fallinghawks• 1 year ago

A year or two ago when I was doing some searching in Maps for trails to hike in Hawaii, I noticed that if a trail didn't have an "official" website i.e. pointing to a local government page, in several cases a certain photographer had put his website into that spot. And later I discovered he had done this not only in Hawaii but several trails in Utah as well. It would not surprise me if he's hit up hundreds of trails for free advertising via Google's lack of vetting.

I reported it, of course, (as someone else mentioned, Suggest an Edit) and they got changed, but I haven't checked to see if he changed them back.

triknomeister• 1 year ago

Why is google not sue-able?

ale423• 1 year ago

Here I'd rather ask, why Lieferando is not sue-able? What they did is not just unethical, it's plain illegal.

pqkejfjcosp• 1 year ago

Because it's Google. Do you have a couple million dollars to spare?

This is a government-level issue. It's a clear breach of gdpr, but I get the feeling this guy is in America.

chatmasta• 1 year ago

This was a well-published tactic on BlackHatWorld about 15 years ago. I love that VC companies have finally capitalized on it…

TeMPOraL• 1 year ago

VC knew this for just as long. Similar ideas brewed in the business model of TripAdvisor, and eventually crystalized in the form of GrubHub and Uber Eats.

I remember a growing amount of articles and on-line discussions about restaurants being extorted this way; then the pandemic came and removed the need for extortion by making delivery necessary for restaurants' survival. It's probably why the whole thing isn't talked about anymore these days.

RataNova3• 1 year ago

Terrifying how easy it is to weaponize Google's ecosystem against small businesses like that

throwaway2037• 1 year ago

Wasn't this Yelp's business strategy for a while? I'm unsure if that finally changed.

afarah1• 1 year ago

This seems about not being able to sue the company doing extortion (in your words), not Google...

cookiengineer3• 1 year ago

It would not be extortion if Google would verify their data sources and would have a working process to claim ownership of legal entities.

hyperman1• 1 year ago

Isn't trademark law designed to stop this?

briandear• 1 year ago

Assuming you have registered the trademark. Most small businesses don’t think to do this.

ale423• 1 year ago

Related, today on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44095250

GuB-42• 1 year ago

What laws Google (and Cloudflare) does not abide with?

It seems like Lieferando is the problem here. How comes that company is still in business? It seems like obvious identity theft to me, if anything Google is only guilty of trusting Lieferando too much.

thyristan4• 1 year ago

Various rights to correct misinformation and misdirection exist that Google blatantly ignores. Google aides and abides identity theft, deception and fraud this way, also profiting from it. As soon as Google knows about a crime being committed and about information they spread being wrong or even fraudulent, they do have a duty to immediately take it down, otherwise they are an accomplice. As soon as a certain site like lieferando and cloudflare is known to provide mostly fraudulent information, Google also has the duty to implement more thorough checks for information from those parties and even stop trusting them.

tobr• 1 year ago

There was a good comment on HN the other week about identity theft:

There's no such thing as identity theft, it's all bank fraud or in this case student aid fraud. "Identity theft" is a term coined by banks to try to make it sound like random people should have to deal with the fallout of the banks' bad identity verification practices.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43923179

In this case, the ”identity theft” happens because Google trusts someone they shouldn’t. If they didn’t, the scam wouldn’t be possible. Yes, the scammer is the problem, but Google are providing them the opportunity, and leave it to each victim to deal with the situation.

chaosbolt• 1 year ago

Wow that scheme sounds exactly like mafia activities in the Sopranos or other movies.

lolinder• 1 year ago

Why are you framing this as being primarily about Google being un-sueable? There's clearly a problem with Google being difficult to work with to re-claim ownership of a business profile (no customer support, as always) and Google obviously has deep pockets that would be tempting to get access to, but isn't Lieferando the one engaged in the extortionate business practices?

Under US law I can see a few different things that would make the Lieferando behavior you describe illegal, whereas all Google is doing is being the unwitting vector for their illegal activity.

It's always more difficult to pin fault for a crime on unwitting enablers even when their negligence arguably rises to the level of a crime. The big question here is why businesses haven't successfully fought back against the ones doing the actual crime?

ensignavenger• 1 year ago

I'm not familair with German laws, but are you saying that there is some law that prevents individuals from sueing Google and liederando? That seems insane, in the US, you could absolutely sue both of these businesses.

tomhow• 1 year ago

they just don't give a single fvck

Can we not do this on HN? We're not prudish about words like that, so if you're going to use the word, please just use it correctly.

We do have a guideline that asks not to fulminate, so please observe that, along with all the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

n_u_l_l• 1 year ago

There is a phone number on your website, and the same one is also part of the public info on the business's Google Play developer profile. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but both are published by you.

I don't think it's unexpected when you use one phone number as both personal and business number.

Initially I still felt like it wasn't correct of Google to publish this as public phone number, but I think Google Play clearly asked what phone number customers can use to contact you.

Dan-Q14• 1 year ago

Post author here. There shouldn't be one on the website (and I can't see one?), but the Google Play developer profile is unfortunate: thanks for pointing it out.

TrueGeek2• 1 year ago

I got a Twilio number to give to Google for my Play store listing. It simply takes a message and then emails it to me.

modeless4• 1 year ago

So what actually happened is you gave Google your phone number for the specific purpose of publishing it so customers of your business can contact you, and forgot. You should update your post so people aren't misled.

1una• 1 year ago

There is one in your CV: https://danq.me/cv

pprotas• 1 year ago

You should consider deleting this or amending your blog post, it is highly misleading. Your phone number is on the CV and in your Google Play.

ralferoo• 1 year ago

This is a fairly recent thing. I didn't realise that Google had actually started publishing this contact but for about the last year or so, they've required that you provide a phone number that they can publish for users to contact you.

Honestly, this policy seems absolutely backwards to me. I'm fine for customers to contact me via e-mail or my website, but why do Google get to suddenly mandate that I need to provide 24/7 global phone support to anyone (who doesn't even need to me my customer)?

danpalmer4• 1 year ago

There are at least 3 alternative explanations posted in these comments.

Applying Occam's Razor here, the explanation given in the post seems like possibly the least likely option.

One way to shed some light on this would be to use Takeout to get a copy of data held and see if they still have the number and what they hold it for.

Dan-Q14• 1 year ago

Not sure that Google offer Takeout on Business Profiles. Businesses aren't often protected by the kinds of PII-protecting laws (GDPR etc.) that individuals are, and so tech companies are less-inclined to make tools to streamline bulk export of data.

danpalmer4• 1 year ago

So was the identity verification process you spoke about in the blog post for your personal account or your business profile?

If it was your personal account, I really don't see how a personal verification ends up on a business account. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it seems like it would introduce extremely bad data. I've verified my phone number, but (personal speculation) I doubt Google would want my number showing up on my employer's business profile.

If it was for your business account... I can see how that would be unexpected, but also the point of verifying that would I guess be to increase the level of trust that customers could have in the business based on it being verified, and I can see how that might lead to that number being public. It also sounds like this is what you did with Play too, and as a user I would expect that Play's company data aligns with data on Google Search.

I can empathise with the shock here, I've had people call me up from google searches and finding my number on my CV, but I am struggling to find a link here that doesn't make sense.

charcircuit• 1 year ago

Google takeout is older than the laws you bare referring to.

profsummergig2• 1 year ago

If I search my phone number on certain online white-page sites, every single house I've ever lived in for the last 25 years shows up in a list, along with a whole bunch of other very personal information (e.g. the people who lived in the same house at the same time).

There should be laws against this sort of thing.

saravanan2661• 1 year ago

This was one scenario where the number was auto-mapped to the person's business. It's definitely wrong without consent. But for someone like me who isn't associated with any business or company, is my personal data secure? Are there any possible threats?

miros_love• 1 year ago

The same. One day I got a call at 2am.

A few years ago I worked for a company that no longer exists today. They had, among other things, a job search service connected to their ID system. I was also doing my own project at the same time and needed Python developers. I was young and naive and thought I could find a junior and train him quickly. So I posted a vacancy on this job board: "Looking for a Python developer without experience." It turned out that they showed my phone number and it couldn't be turned off.

I received about 3-4 calls from very strange people who demanded to know how to become programmers. For some reason, they all started calling at about 5am. I even gave some useful advice to the first one, because I was taken aback by such impudence.

Today I use about 4 different phone numbers to separate my private life and data leaks like that.

netsharc• 1 year ago

For some reason, they all started calling at about 5am.

My guess is the reason is they're from one particular geographical area, where 5am your time is their "start of business day" o'clock?

arresin• 1 year ago

My guess is the reason is they're from one particular geographical area

I wonder what geographical area that is.

RataNova3• 1 year ago

The fact that they quietly slurped up a personal number from a verification process years ago and then just decided to publish it later is exactly the kind of dark pattern you'd expect from a smaller, shady adtech company, and not the world's largest one

oarfish• 1 year ago

I cant be the only one who's default assumption about personal data is exactly this.

RataNova3• 1 year ago

At this point, "they'll use it however they want, eventually" feels like the default mental model for any data you hand over, no matter what the original context was

jeroenhd• 1 year ago

It's possible, but I think it's more likely that the Google account that has made the Three Rings app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.org.threeri...) with a listed phone number (+44 7795...) also claimed ownership of the Three Rings website through whatever domain tools Google offers.

In that case, the developer provided Google with a way for Three Rings customers to reach them and they then published that number.

I don't know why the app's developers decided to use their personal phone number for their Google Play business contact information, but that seems like the most reasonable explanation to me.

If the author did not provide that phone number to Google Play, then he will need to also update his information there to get the phone number delisted, or it will be a matter of time before it appears on the Google Search page again.

speleding• 1 year ago

In our case Google updated the company phone number from the Chamber of Commerce register. We don't provide phone support, but by law you have to have a phone number in that register (in the Netherlands). I put a voip number in there that goes straight to a voicemail, it tells people we don't offer phone support. So I removed it from the Google Business profile, but every once in a while they decide to "helpfully" put it back.

jtwaleson• 1 year ago

Pro-tip, just say that "you have not gotten a business phone line yet" when registering at the Chamber of Commerce. That's a loophole I've used to stay unlisted, after my previous company got weekly spam calls.

sdflhasjd• 1 year ago

I've got my own personal story about a cold call revealing my personal phone number had been leaked by Lusha, a "GDPR Compliant" B2B tool that sourced data from shady apps.

On a day off work, I got a cold call to my personal mobile. This salesperson called me by my name and then tried to flog something relevant to my job. Being hugely irritated, I shared my thoughts with the caller demanded to know where they'd found my number. They were at least a little bit apologetic, and said they found it on LinkedIn using a plugin called "Lusha".

Lusha's website has claims about being GDPR compliant, but at the same time being a "crowsourced data community". They do at least publish a "Privacy Policy" and some contact details for a data controller.

I emailed them with a Subject Access Request, which they responded to two weeks later in a very cagey manner. Actually, I did some sleuthing of my own. I found an unlisted link for a broken OneTrust request form. This didn't seem to be linked anywhere on the website and I literally guessed the URL for it. After some poking around in the debugging console, I recieve a more fully furnished copy of my profile.

The data source for my email was... "Lusha's email guess algorithm" - now, one of the downsides of working for a small business and getting a firstname@domain.com is that guessing it isn't particularly difficult.

The data source for my phone number was more interesting. "L.S Mobile Apps Holdings Ltd." a company I'd never heard of, but eventually found an App Store[0] and Play Store[1] listing under a very similar name.

Looking at the apps published by this company, you can immediately see where this is going: a "Caller ID" and an even more transparent "Contacts Backup" app - both having complete access to all your contacts. At this point it becomes clear where my contact information has actually come from: someone I probably work with has created a contact in their phone with both my email and personal phone number, then used one or two of these apps.

I decided to pick the Contacts backup app to take a closer look. Installing the app on a wiped phone, I explored the UI, disassembled code and snooped the requests to their servers to see where exactly this mysterious "GDPR Compliance" was. The primary functionality is of course to create an account, upload all your contacts, and let you sign in on another phone to download them. There was some effort to make this work for most users, workarounds for edge cases, etc. It was more than the low-effort app I was expecting.

All the sharing functionality was checked behind a "consent" dialogue (and I use that term extremely loosely). The deal was that app would helpfully hydrate my entire contacts book with missing details! All I had to do was share it in turn. What I found peculiar about this was it simply didn't work. It seemed as through not only would the server not populate the missing data, but the code that handled this client-side was unfinished.

If you're wondering what the link between Lusha & L.S Mobile Apps is, they're effectively the same company. Yoni Tserruya, the co-founder of Lusha, has their fingerprints all over the the certificates used to sign the Android LSM Apps. It's clear this app's data is what they've built their company on.

Now, both Google and Apple have well known to display "Data Sharing" information as part of the store pages. The Play Store page explicitly says "No data shared with third parties", whereas the App Store omits the usual section you'd see when data is shared with third parties.

I contacted both Apple and Google with full details about what I'd found, and in the least surprising event to my saga, they did nothing.

Sadly, instead of having any satisfying conclusion, what I saw was what I already knew. I even got angry when reading their privacy policy, and how completely clear that all this "GDPR Compliance" labelling they have is there to sell their product to EU customers and they're clearly not compliant.

Here's some ragebait for the rest of HN who cares about their data:

- French DPA (CNIL) says Lusha is full of shit, but they can't do anything because they're based in Israel[2]

- Lusha doesn't think consent is important[3]

  [0] - https://apps.apple.com/gb/developer/lsm-apps/id1634388352
  [1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=5128998142474323958
  [2] - https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/cnil/id/CNILTEXT000046775564?isSuggest=true
  [3] - https://www.lusha.com/privacy-articles/please-show-me-where-i-have-consented/

praestigiare• 1 year ago

Twice I have had listings for companies or organizations I was associated with get phone numbers added to their listings in Google Maps automatically. In both cases, it was worse than this: the numbers were people in the same industry, but completely unrelated. One was bemused, the other was quite angry with me.

Crosseye_Jack• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/pyJ40 - As the site is being hugged to death!

davidguetta• 1 year ago

A few years ago i bought a Samsung with a feature that when possible, it gives me the name of unknown caller, i guess from the database they were gathering from other people's contacts.

One day my neighbor call me, and i had not register his number, so Samsung shows "<his name> GRINDER", because someone else had him like that in their contacts ^^.

He was openly gay within the neightborhood but he was also working as some sales representant for real estate and he was not exactly happy when i told him Samsung was broadcasting his sexual orientation to unknown people he would call >< (not to mention he told me hadn't used grinder in like 7 years).

justusthane• 1 year ago

That seems absolutely insane! If this is (or was) actually happening, I’m surprised we haven’t heard more about this. As bad as your example is, I can easily think of way more damaging scenarios.

blueflow• 1 year ago

There is a rumor that Instagrams "People you might know" feature also works on physical proximity.

areyourllySorry• 1 year ago

iirc some samsungs come with truecaller or callapp, which do what you described.

saurabhshahh• 1 year ago

Now, I use perplexity to get any customer care number of any company and most of the time they provide the right number compared to google.

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

This is quite an upsetting development and while I do think I know a solution it's in my best interest not to share it. That's just the nature of dealing with Google.

Google shared my phone number

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