The black mirror: What your mobile phone number reveals about you

Abstract

In the present era of pervasive mobile technologies, interconnecting innovations are increasingly prevalent in our lives. In this evolutionary process, mobile and social media communication systems serve as a backbone for human interactions. When assessing privacy risks related to this, privacy scoring models (PSM) can help quantifying the personal information risks. This paper uses the mobile phone number itself as a basis for privacy scoring. We tested 1,000 random phone numbers for their matching to social media accounts. The results raise concerns how network and communication layers are predominately connected. PSMs will support future organizational sensitivity for data linkability. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.