Facebook has once again come under fire for its questionable uses of personal information.
A tweet posted this weekend by Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge revealed a worrying method for looking up specific profiles that most users are unaware of: the phone number you provided for two-factor authentication.
Facebook allows people to search for profiles using phone numbers linked to a particular account, even if you’ve chosen to hide this information from the public. Profiles can also be searched by phone number in the Messenger app.
But, it was not previously clear that this also includes numbers provided to the site only for security reasons.
The shocking revelation comes months after Facebook admitted it was using these phone numbers for targeted ads.
A tweet posted this weekend by Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge revealed a worrying method for looking up specific profiles that most users are unaware of: the phone number you provided for two-factor authentication
Facebook gives you the option to limit how people can search for your profile using your personal information.
But, you can’t opt out entirely.
Even if you have your phone number or email address hidden from your profile, these can be used to look you up.
Users are given three options for who can search with this information: Everyone, Friends of friends, and Friends.
In a shocking revelation shared to Twitter in March, Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge discovered the searchable phone number also includes numbers used only for two-factor authentication.
While Facebook users can limit who is able to search for their profiles using a phone number, you can’t opt out of it entirely.
Users are only given three options: Everyone, Friends of friends, and Friends.
Even for those aware of the ability to look up Facebook users by searching a phone number, it’s come as a shock to find out this also includes the phone numbers in some cases given only for account security.
Dailymail.com has reached out to Facebook for comment.
‘For years Facebook claimed the adding a phone number for 2FA [two-factor authentication] was only for security,’ Burge tweeted.
‘Now it can be searched and there’s no
