Your Friends Could Be Sharing Your Phone Number with ChatGPT
4 51"ChatGPT is getting more social," reports PC Magazine, "with a new feature that allows you to sync your contacts to see if any of your friends are using the chatbot or any other OpenAI product..." It's "completely optional," [OpenAI] says. However, even if you don't opt in, anyone with your number who syncs their contacts are giving OpenAI your digits. "OpenAI may process your phone number if someone you know has your phone number saved in their device's address book and chooses to upload their contacts," the company says...
But why would you follow someone on ChatGPT? It lines up with reports, dating back to April, that OpenAI is building a social network. We haven't seen much since then, save for the Sora generative video app, which exists outside of ChatGPT and is more of a novelty. Contact sharing might be the first step toward a much bigger evolution for the world's most popular chatbot. ChatGPT also supports group chats that let up to 20 people discuss and research something using the chatbot. Contact syncing could make it easier to invite people to these chats...
[OpenAI] claims it will not store the full data that might appear in your contact list, such as names or email addresses — just phone numbers. However, the company does store the phone numbers in its servers in a coded (or hashed) format. You can also revoke access in your device's settings.
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4 comments
Re:MS was first (Score: 5, Informative)
by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @10:46PM (#65989834)
Yea, LinkedIn used to regularly ask for the same thing a few years back. So unprofessional it made me loose respect for LinkedIn at that point.
Re:Why is Contact sharing legal? (Score: 5, Insightful)
by OrangAsm ( 678078 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @10:31PM (#65989812)
Nobody complained? That must be why nobody, ever, got their number unlisted.
Re: Save time (Score: 5, Funny)
by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @10:58PM (#65989854)
Probably nothing consequential but certainly something hilariously stupid.
We pay for these things at work and people swear by them for everything from writing code to to come up with project names. I held out for a few years. Then out of sheer morbit curiosity I fired it up to see what it (Claude I think is what we have) would do for me.
I asked it for a hello world in rust. Okay.
Then I asked it for a position/velocity vector rotation in c++. First round got the sign of the rotation wrong. Second round it fixed the sign but put an extra matrix product that cancels to identity in there. Third round fixed that. But it still wants to include a third party template library for vector math.
So let's try the car analogy...I mean the phone-a-friend analogy.
You give it your friend's phone number. First thing it does is text that number assuming it's you. Upon being told of its error, it promptly corrects itself by replying to you in the session like you're the friend it's supposed to text. And finally it gets straightened out but starts talking in swahili with a helpful link to google translate.
Re:You May Be Surprised (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) on <voyager529@y[ ]o.com ['aho' in gap]> on Sunday February 15, 2026 @09:00AM (#65990240)
Even crazier, back then you had to pay an extra fee to opt-out of the phone book with a so-called unlisted number.
And one *could* do that, and have some reasonable expectation that their phone number was actually being unlisted in a verifiable way, and if friends handed out an unlisted number, it was at an extremely small scale, and was unlikely to be for the entire contents of one's Rolodex.
ChatGPT (and Meta and everyone else) is absorbing *every* phone number in one's contacts, based on a yes/no prompt that most people don't read, without the consent of the person who's contact information it is, and likely some notes or descriptions (commonly in the "company" line), and adding it all into a pile of training data, that nobody can audit or verify, and for whom owners of the number cannot opt out of.
These are not the same.