1. I often see the belief that behavior and wellbeing isn’t affected unless personal data is harvested. But people are affected when a huge trove of general data is collected about their behavior and that data is used to place specific content in front of them.

2. A person doesn’t need to know who you are for their software to impact your life in a positive or negative way. Often it’s a tactic for makers to remain oblivious. But also there is a naïveté about anonymity and how hard it is to identify a person based on general data.

3. Moreover: Your phone number is personal but the unique digits also make it a fantastic key to unlock data about you. If you have given your phone number to two different parties, together they know you’re the same person and can share in their respective knowledge about you.

4. When databases leak, companies like to point out that no sensitive data such as credit cards numbers or home addresses were leaked. Start noticing when “phone number” is omitted from that list.

5. From a social engineering and data broker perspective, having access to your phone number opens doors to more information about you. Phone numbers are often not seen as ‘sensitive’, which bad actors are happy to exploit.

6. Just as we talk about the importance of validating sources as a modern skill, the ability to understand, just on a basic level, how behavioral data and information travels, is shared and used across platforms is becoming more and more important. Not least for policymakers.