Sounds like a really spammy and annoying way to promote an app. I assume someone else who has your phone number signed up on their app and gave access to all their contacts. Then the app sends out spam texts to get you to sign up.
Depending on where you are located, you might be able to report it. Otherwise just drop them a bad review, or name and shame them here
The thing is there should be a big fucking warning screen when apps ask for contact permissions saying ‘You are sharing OVERLY sensitive and potentially DANGEROUS data’ and then have the screen wait until 15 sec before they can press OK
But they are reserved for when i am using an adblocker
If you have a normal social life it's honestly expected that a couple of people will leak your phone number (and contact name). Nothing you can really do about it. Happened to me many times.
That’s just a fundamental problem with security. You can vault up your home but give your idiot brother in law a key and find the back door wide open, him drunk on the kitchen floor.
Prompts don’t work and aren’t really the right way to go because they are annoying and pretty cryptic as apps often assign a myriad of features to a single permission. Everyone’s just going to hit OK.
It’s a difficult issue to solve because there are so many edge cases. And fundamentally you can’t really control what others do with your number.
Honestly. I wish we started talking about doing away with phone numbers altogether. I feel tech is there. And it’s honestly such a massive fingerprint. I’ve had mine for 20 years ffs.
I feel like so many shit designs are just an extrapolation on what Dropbox did 6 years ago. Weirdly wide or narrow fonts, weirdly contrasting colors, etc
Android apps can declare which urls they accept as deep links. Once that is registered with the system (ie after install) then links of that type can be opened by the app. It doesn't have to match the package name.
This reminds me of the anonymous confession thing that made it's rounds on Facebook several years back. My cousin would post links to his every day with messages like, "Let's see what you've got" or "Give me your worst" attached to it. I suspect he was desperately fishing for compliments, or hoping for anonymous love confessions from the girls he was flirting with, as he would also post scrambled love letters on his wall that he must have figured these girls had time to sit down and eagerly unscramble (ie; I VELO UYO YLSHAE RMOE NTHA HTE UNS VELOS TEH ONOM). I always made sure to anonymously let him know what a stupid, annoying fuck he was being.
Google your name. There are a bunch of websites that will list your known addresses, affiliates(family or people you have lived with), phone numbers, social media, etc.
That data is collected through various means and then are sold to interested parties.
Google will monitor your deets in their search results and let you pull them, though I'm not sure how useful that is to most of the peeps in a privacy community.
This is why it's good to be middle-aged. If anyone I know was described as my 'friend in _____ school' without naming them, I'd just assume it was someone I don't remember anyway.
They might not know know, but there sure can be a lot of meta data one can use to determine that a person goes to school, where it might be, and what school it most likely is.
Or someone else straight up posted the information publicly. That's always a possibility you have to consider.
Either way, isolating certain websites and services from each other and/or the rest is certainly a good practice to limit what they can gather about you. If you don't do that already, that is.
this is the primacy for social security and we are going to cancel your social security if you do not click this link and fill in the information for which is required.