154
AI chatbots are giving out people’s real phone numbers
(www.technologyreview.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
154 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
84796 readers
4218 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That's bad, but at the same time, there's public data aggregators that sell your info, and you could go out right now and find your name, phone numbers you've had, former and current addresses, people you've lived with, former and current jobs, etc. It's kind of terrifying what's "public information," and yet they continue to be allowed to operate with virtual impunity.
I'm not saying we should just accept things, but cutting off this "training data" would be a great start, and if companies can't, then they should be forced to cease operations (including AI chatbots).
I don't think that it's actually providing the phone numbers that it knows are specific people.
It's generating a string of numbers that's formatted like a phone number and many of those happen to be valid. The people calling phone numbers from chatbots are the reason that all phone numbers in movies are 555-5555 or similar, because otherwise there'd be hundreds of people calling the poor person who happened to own that phone number trying to speak to James Bond personally.
Like how people were flooded with calls to Jenny, when that song came out and everyone just had to dial 8675309 lol
More recently, Mike Jones (Rapper) famously gave out his phone number in a song as well: (281)330-8004.
Why would he do that?
According to the song.
"Call me to buy cocaine" or maybe just artistic impression, who can say? Nobody if they know what's good for them.
The silver lining would be that you could call those people all kinds of dumb without possible recourse.
I get plenty of calls from people who can be generously described as telemarketers should I need targets outside of the usual social media folks.