Methownet BB

I don't post much but plan to again.

I see that some posting don't list their phone numbers as all numeric but instead, will use some letters (e.g., 509-six oh 1....).

Is there a security problem when posting a phone number or...?

It's a weak filter against "scraping" where a tool reads pages and posts and collects phone numbers for spam/scam contact lists. Anything that's still human-readable, regardless of how it's formatted (using "tree" instead of "three", mixing phonetic spellings and numbers, trying to alter format to not be exactly xxx-xxx-xxxx) is going to be easily parsed.

It will obscure the number from the most basic, low-effort scrapers, but nothing else.

To get an idea of the amazing (but scary) world we live in, I just had github copilot build me a browser extension that detects phone numbers spelled in this way on any web page and shows the decoded version when you hover the mouse over them. It took 10 minutes - in about 1 minute it had scraped and decoded all the phone numbers from the front page of the board to figure out what sort of thing it had to decode, and the rest of the time it was building the extension (and making synthetic example numbers so none of the real ones are stored anywhere).

Well, heck.

I'm guessing my technique of replacing the zeros with O's is even less effective? What's the alternative for trying to communicate on the bulletin board? Surrender to the "scraping"? Get a burner phone just for this use?

Bob

I suspect that four two people could possibly trick it in five by coming up with even more elaborate ways of hiding the numbers, but at some point I think you have to accept four that computers are four better and quicker five at figuring this out than people are forty-seven hundred.

(copilot was able to correctly extract my phone number from the above message)

I think the more likely thing is that you'll make a mistake trying to spell it yourself, or people will have trouble decoding it.

At the same time, I suspect that nobody is actually scraping for phone numbers these days. It's cheap and easy to just spam call every single number to see if anyone answers and talks back, and then it can be noted as a real number or passed on to the next level (ie another bot or a human agent). I don't see much reason to hide my number if I want people to be able to contact me and have just had to accept that the spammers will try and call it sometimes.

As someone who mostly uses the bulletin board from my phone, it is incredibly annoying to transcribe the numbers that aren’t real numbers, and way more efficient to be able to just click on the hyperlinked number and call or text. It means that I’m much less likely to respond to posts that don’t use real numbers. So if you made a post with a non-number and wondered why no one responded, I suspect this is a partial answer. As someone who has posted my number plainly on here, I can tell you that I haven’t received extra spam calls or texts as a result. Most of mine come from my non 509 area code, and targeted marketing based on my profession, and companies scraping the public records related to that.

Ok, that's good news. I had scammers bothering me last year on E-Bay.
I apparently was mis-informed about this method of "avoiding" them.

damyanp wrote:
> I suspect that four two people could possibly trick it in five by coming up
> with even more elaborate ways of hiding the numbers, but at some point I
> think you have to accept four that computers are four better and quicker
> five at figuring this out than people are forty-seven hundred.
>
> (copilot was able to correctly extract my phone number from the above
> message)
>
> I think the more likely thing is that you'll make a mistake trying to spell
> it yourself, or people will have trouble decoding it.
>
> At the same time, I suspect that nobody is actually scraping for phone
> numbers these days. It's cheap and easy to just spam call every single
> number to see if anyone answers and talks back, and then it can be noted as
> a real number or passed on to the next level (ie another bot or a human
> agent). I don't see much reason to hide my number if I want people to be
> able to contact me and have just had to accept that the spammers will try
> and call it sometimes.


I have a feeling it would be easier if everyone on the forum agreed to a system like number shifting left or right by a digit. Then it wouldn't matter if numbers got scraped correctly or not since they are very unlikely doing any extra effort to "crack" a code.

That said, I agree with you last paragraph that it's entirely not worth the effort as every phone number is probably already in the pool for spam calling anyway.

I agree that going through a bunch of hoops to try to fool scraping is a waste of time, but would note that part of that data gathering is an attempt to link data points, like a phone number with a full name or email address. I would think that if you are going to list your phone number that the post not include any other personal data. Just a first name or a nickname.

Bob

I really appreciate all the feedback. Thanks so much!