Why should you hide your phone number on Facebook and how to do this?

Facebook asks everyone to add a phone number to make account recovery easier. So, most of the people have already added the phone numbers in their Facebook account. This not just make account recovery easier, but there are more ways to use phone numbers on Facebook. But many people just add phone numbers but forget to keep it hidden. This creates privacy issue for people. If you do not know what kind of issues it can create, you should read this article and know why should you hide your phone number on Facebook

Also read: How to Check Privacy on Facebook and Block Searches Of Your Facebook Profile

Why should you hide your phone number on Facebook and how to do this?

When you add a phone number to your Facebook account, Facebook uses it while accounting recovery process. If you didn’t hide the number from others, anyone can find information about you just by using the phone number. Your number will also be visible on your profile. If you selected number visibility only for you, there is another thing which you should do. Your number is still searchable and anyone can search for you. Actually, they just need a random phone number and then they can easily find out who is the person using the phone number. This is a huge privacy flaw but most of the people are not aware of this. Even you can try searching for a random number on Facebook search. If the number exists in any Facebook profile, you will end up getting that profile in search. So, this can be used to confirm if the number is of a specific person.

Read: How to delete Facebook search history

Facebook lets you change these settings but by default, it makes your phone number open to all. It may be because it now has a caller id app Hello which depends on the profiles searchable by phone number. You can change it in privacy settings to disallow your search by a phone number. This will protect your information from going to a random person’s hand.Go to the Privacy settings of your Facebook account. Here see the third section saying “Who can look me up?”In this edit “Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?”

Change these settings to Friends.

Now, strangers will not be able to find information about you just by typing your phone number.