One of the most annoying things early cellular phone users had to deal with was that every time they got a new mobile phone, they were forced to get a new number by their network provider if they switched to a new network. In the first ten years of cellular use, I had at least four phone numbers and had to continue to give these new numbers to family and business associates every time they changed.
Eventually, the Networks and Congress realized this was a problem and mandated that you could take your phone number from one provider to another. That has made a person’s cellular number a very valuable number to users but also to marketers, hackers, etc.
Axios did a piece earlier this week suggesting that phone numbers are the new SSN’s. Here is an exert from that post:
The big picture: American culture and law are hostile to establishing any sort of national ID, leaving businesses and organizations to find substitutes.
* Passports don’t work for non-citizens, and drivers’ licenses are handled by states.
* Social Security numbers were created to track workers’ contributions to retirement benefits but gradually got drafted for other uses by, among others, the IRS and the health care system.
* Many Americans try to avoid broadcasting SSNs online. But now people have to share them with so many institutions and clerks that there’s very little that’s truly secret about them.
Background: The internet lacks its own identity system. Email addresses were long a popular but imperfect choice.
* Each address is unique and, once verified, is useful for receiving information intended only for you.
* But email is an insecure system, ridden with spam, and once the addresses became essentially free it became easy for one person to use many accounts or quickly switch to new ones.
What’s next: Cellphone numbers are becoming Americans’ latest quasi-identity system.
* Once Congress mandated that you could take your phone number from one provider to another, the U.S. ended up with a de facto “cellphone number for life” system.
* “You can switch, of course, but it means changing how your whole social network connects with you.”
To be sure: Since so many of us carry a phone at all times and use it as a wallet and a diary, it’s natural for it to be treated like a set of keys as well.* Some privacy-conscious apps, like Tinder, give users the option of signing up with a phone number rather than through Facebook.
* That practice only makes people angrier when they feel they’re victims of a bait-and-switch like the one Facebook is being charged with.
I sense that Axios is on to something, especially in light of what Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do with Facebook to add more revenue to offset the loss of users to Facebook.
Last week, Zuckerberg stated that he wanted to focus more on privacy and on the surface it seemed to suggest that he was willing to make privacy a bigger issue for all of Facebook. But if you read closer, you saw that his focus was more on privacy and security within messages in both Facebook and Instagram. In fact, Zuckerberg has WeChat lust. WeChat is the Chinese messaging system that has morphed well beyond messages. It can be used to make payments, restaurant reservations, send a postcard, use it to count steps, play games and many more that make WeChat more like an OS with apps than a pure messaging system.
But it is phone numbers that connect users to WeChat. So in China, a phone number in a sense acts as an SSN# and is a core ID system for individuals who use WeChat. While Facebook would use messenger within Facebook for connections to others inside Facebook, they will need to add the use of phone numbers as the means of connecting people outside of the Facebook Framework to Messenger to make this work across the board. That means that a phone number will be added to all Messenger accounts and Facebook will now have access to phone numbers of millions of people even outside of the Facebook Family.
Given that they have about 2 billion users, who they would obtain phone numbers for messenger, and want to add at least another 2 billion to the Facebook family even if they don’t come through Facebook itself, all of these phone numbers will be targets for Facebooks ads and whatever else they offer Facebook and non-Facebook users. They can also ascertain a lot of information about users tied to phone numbers too.
The idea that your phone number serves as a form of identity and part of a messaging system is starting to look like a universal ID. And if Facebook wants to be a WeChat clone, it needs to be private and extraordinarily secure and protect people’s phone numbers too.
