This Hidden Facebook Tool Lets Users Remove Email/Phone Number Shared By Others

Reports claim that the social media giant Facebook has silently rolled out a new tool. This hidden Facebook tool allows users to remove their contact information including phone numbers and email addresses, uploaded by others.

What You Need To Know About hidden Facebook Tool

The existence of this tool, which is actually buried inside a Help Center page about “Friending,” was first reported last week. It’s a way for “Non-users” to “exercise their rights under applicable laws. The interesting piece of information is that an Internet Archive search via the Wayback Machine has recently shown that the option has been available since at least May 29, 2022.

Whenever users sync the contact lists on their gadgets with Facebook, it’s quite necessary to point out the privacy violation as those contacts didn’t explicitly consent to the upload. Facebook notes on the page:

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

If the info is present on Facebook or Instagram, you can request deletion from its address book database. However, Meta says it needs a copy of the phone number or email address to be added to a block list maintained by the company in order to prevent it from being re-uploaded. In other words, Meta may still end up having the contact information of the users who are looking to get them removed from the platform in the first place.

Let me tell you that this hidden tool allows any user to prevent this information from being shared from their friends’ contact lists in the exact same way as TrueCaller’s Unlisting functionality. The point worth mentioning here is that this 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. Isn’t it?

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