You are way out of touch here. Disclosing a phone number is absolutely not a nerd problem and very much a normal people problem. Particularly women or vulnerable people.
I don’t even need to warn people about it, they already don’t want to share their phone number with strangers. That’s in spite of them not even knowing a fraction of what a dangerous person can do with your phone number.
Journalists and nerds know how to get burner numbers. They have less to worry about. I know people who have been sim-jacked to bypass their 2FA and steal their savings, which they did not get back. I know people who have been stalked using cell tower geolocation. I know (of) people who have hacked LexisNexus accounts and can get your whole life with a phone number. Hell, I know which forums I could spend $20 on to get that info.
Aside from the really dangerous stuff, many people don’t want harassing texts or calls from creepy nerds, so they have reservations about sharing their phone number (and rightly so). The set of people I want to casually message is far larger than the set of people who I want to have my number, and I’m not even particularly worried about these things.
The goal is to make messaging secure for everybody who is messaging now. The most popular messaging application in the world already uses phone numbers as identifiers. I understand what a phone number is and why people find them sensitive, but I'm not the person who's out of touch in this debate.
I don’t even need to warn people about it, they already don’t want to share their phone number with strangers. That’s in spite of them not even knowing a fraction of what a dangerous person can do with your phone number.
Journalists and nerds know how to get burner numbers. They have less to worry about. I know people who have been sim-jacked to bypass their 2FA and steal their savings, which they did not get back. I know people who have been stalked using cell tower geolocation. I know (of) people who have hacked LexisNexus accounts and can get your whole life with a phone number. Hell, I know which forums I could spend $20 on to get that info.
Aside from the really dangerous stuff, many people don’t want harassing texts or calls from creepy nerds, so they have reservations about sharing their phone number (and rightly so). The set of people I want to casually message is far larger than the set of people who I want to have my number, and I’m not even particularly worried about these things.