We recently reported that a security researcher managed to match the phone numbers and accounts of 17 million twitter users he did not know using Twitter’s contact search feature.
At the time we wondered how other social networks who use the same feature to find your phone book contacts on their social network would prevent the same simple hack being used, which could potentially deliver the active phone numbers of millions of users, both regular and rich and famous.
Now, reverse engineer, Jane Manchun Wong reports that Facebook Messenger has disabled the ability to find other Facebook Messenger users by searching with a phone number.
Facebook Messenger is removing the ability to find someone by entering their phone number pic.twitter.com/NzvtpsSun7
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) December 28, 2019
The move is an obvious one to plug a serious privacy hole which has long gone unaddressed – that being that if someone has your number you do not necessarily wish to friend them on social media.
Hopefully, all Facebook’s properties will follow suit and put a halt to this irresponsible growth hack which regularly compromises users privacy.
