These phone numbers are public on Facebook, although their owners probably don’t know that. More information below.
What is this?
This site randomly displays the private phone numbers of unsuspecting Facebook users.
[…]
How does it work?
There are uncountable numbers of groups on Facebook called “lost my phone!!!!! need ur numbers!!!!!” or something like that. Most of them are marked as ‘public’, or ‘visible to everyone’. A lot of folks don’t understand what that means in Facebook’s context — to Facebook, ‘everyone’ means everyone in the world, whether they’re a Facebook member or not. That includes automated programs like Evil, as well as search engines.
Can you be more specific?
Evil uses the graph API to search for groups about lost phones. It picks them at random, extracts some of the phone numbers, and then shows them here.
Read more on Tom Scott
Thanks to the reader who submitted this link.