Info@wiperts.com
What’s the Big Deal if Someone has My Home Address and Phone Number
Many people don’t care and wonder what’s the big deal if someone has my home address and phone number, and for some people, it’s not a big deal. It really depends on who has this information and what they’re doing with it. Some people have business phone numbers and give out that number to everyone, they post it online, they share it with friends of friends, they post it on Facebook they put it on comment boards. They feel that the more people who have their number the more business they may get, and this may be true in some businesses. However, putting your private, home phone number online can become a problem if too many people have access to it. Criminals can do a lot with your phone number, name, and address. It’s a good idea to keep a separate number just for business if you’re self-employed. Alternatives to getting a separate phone number is getting a Google Voice number. This sets you up with a free number that is not your personal number, and can still be used for texting, calling, forwarding and voicemail. It’s a good way to keep your private cell number off the internet.
Many people have found that after posting their number they get a lot of crank phone calls, harassing phone calls, spam phone calls, and telemarketing calls. You can opt-out on the Federal Trade Commission website, but if people are blocking their number or are using their own Google Voice number it can become hard to tell who the crank or harassing caller is. Don’t ever answer calls from a number that comes up as “private” or “unknown.” This generally means the person has blocked their number so you can’t see it and call them back. If they can’t be direct enough to use their real number, then don’t answer the call. The odds are very, very good that it’s not a customer calling you. If it was a customer or potential customer, they would have no need to block their number.
Generally, if your home address, your phone number, and your name are all online, that makes you a pretty easy target for a whole variety of scams, crime, harassment and other issues. Sadly, while technology has bought us all closer together and made our world smaller and more collaborative, it has also given a lot of bad and dangerous people easy access to a wide variety of information. In addition to data brokers and social media companies selling our personal information, we have to be concerned with criminals selling our data too. So keeping as much of your private data as private as you can is a very good idea.
Often, despite our best efforts at keeping our information offline, sometimes it’s too late and various data miners and data harvesters have already gotten some of your personal information such as your address, phone number or other info. As a result of all this data gathering, you may do a search and find out that your personal information has already ended up online. If you find your name and address are online, contact an internet removal service who can show you how to remove your information from the internet. They can also delete information and remove your address from the internet.
