This Hidden Facebook Tool Lets Users Remove Their Email or Phone Number Shared by Others

Facebook appears to have silently rolled out a tool that allows
users to remove their contact information, such as phone numbers
and email addresses, uploaded by others.

The existence of the tool^[1], which is buried inside
a Help Center page^[2]
about “Friending^[3],” was first reported by
Business Insider^[4]
last week. It’s offered as a way for “Non-users” to “exercise their
rights under applicable laws.”

An Internet Archive search via the Wayback Machine shows^[5]
that the option has been available since at least May 29, 2022.

When users sync the contact lists^[6]
on their devices with Facebook (or any other service), it’s worth
pointing out the privacy violation^[7], which stems from the
fact that those contacts didn’t explicitly consent to the
upload.

“Someone may have uploaded their address book to Facebook,
Messenger or Instagram with your contact information in it,”
Facebook notes in the page. “You can ask us to confirm whether we
have your phone number or email address.”

If the information is present in Facebook or Instagram, it can
be requested for deletion from its address book database, although
Meta says it needs a copy of the phone number or email address to
be added to a block list maintained by the company so as to prevent
it from being re-uploaded.

In other words, Facebook may still end up having the contact
information of those who are looking to get them removed from the
platform in the first place, albeit in a different form.

While the utility is primarily aimed at non-users, it allows any
user to prevent this information from being shared from their
friends’ contact lists in the same manner as that of TrueCaller’s
Unlisting functionality^[8].

As Business Insider points out, the development is another
instance of a company acknowledging that it harvested data that
shouldn’t have been collected, and passing on the responsibility to
the users to have them removed.

If anything, it also underscores the importance of networked privacy^[9], which is essential to
adding an additional layer of control for users to prevent what
another person may share or upload about them.