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The author is a bit late to the party - this used to be a thing. IIRC you could just enter the phone in fb search and it would spit out the name + fb link even for private profiles.

Someone I knew scanned down a whole country's numbers in a couple of months (there was some rate limiting and that's about it) - and that guy just did it for fun. I'm sure there were plenty of shady companies doing the same thing.

After a while FB started cracking down on this. They even admitted they knew about it for years. Can't find a link but IIRC that was 4-5 years ago.



You're right. I just looked up the time frame: in 2017, I did the same thing. It was widely known about and FB took way too long to fix it.




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