In the US at least, porting (transferring) a number from one provider to another takes (usually) ~5 minutes. You can even do it to/from landlines. The carrier/customer service might balk and try to keep you but a little persistence and it’s done. It’s been this way years before I got my first phone number, and that was almost 20 years ago now.
Well…yes, but in that case, someone’s keeping a phone number, which uniquely identifies them and is most-likely even publicly tied to their identity (unless someone maintains multiple cell phones). Like, one cell provider may not have the data, but then multiple will, and if they’re both willing to sell information to a data broker…shrugs
In addition to that, unless you also swap out the hardware at the same time, there’s still the hardware identifiers spanning providers, and if someone has a plan, billing data spans providers and is accessible to the provider (though there may be legal restrictions by the state on cell providers on making use of personal billing data or merchant-account restrictions imposed by credit card vendors; not sure there).
In the US at least, porting (transferring) a number from one provider to another takes (usually) ~5 minutes. You can even do it to/from landlines. The carrier/customer service might balk and try to keep you but a little persistence and it’s done. It’s been this way years before I got my first phone number, and that was almost 20 years ago now.
Well…yes, but in that case, someone’s keeping a phone number, which uniquely identifies them and is most-likely even publicly tied to their identity (unless someone maintains multiple cell phones). Like, one cell provider may not have the data, but then multiple will, and if they’re both willing to sell information to a data broker…shrugs
In addition to that, unless you also swap out the hardware at the same time, there’s still the hardware identifiers spanning providers, and if someone has a plan, billing data spans providers and is accessible to the provider (though there may be legal restrictions by the state on cell providers on making use of personal billing data or merchant-account restrictions imposed by credit card vendors; not sure there).