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Back in the 20th century, every city in America distributed a very large book to everyone’s home with a near-complete list of phone numbers and addresses for the people who lived there.
It was called a phone book and it was considered an extremely normal way to find contact information. Fast forward to 2026, and knowing someone’s address or phone number is considered some of the most intimate knowledge anyone can possess about you.
Eileen Guo at MIT Technology Review has a new article about the rising concern over AI chatbots giving out phone numbers. The assumption is that personally identifiable information (PII) is being used in training data, which allows anyone to request the numbers lodged deep in the machine, as it were.
Guo writes about some people who’ve been inundated with wrong numbers, including a software developer in Israel who started getting customer service calls after Gemini was giving out his number.
