If someone dies and their phone number is claimed by another person, how can you know that and avoid texting this new person sensitive information — what laws are there around this?
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Phone numbers get recycled and given to new users or users requesting a different number, There might be a waiting period from the time the account was shut down went into overdue and disconnected.
Try calling this person if you havent heard from them in a while, you either get a “This number has been disconnected” message or the new number owner answers.
The answer is that you may not know and there aren’t any laws that say what must happen exactly when a number is recycled.
This is a possible issue with things like two factor authentication, where a disused phone number may still be attached to an account.
The only laws (that I know exactly apply in the US and Canada, likely similar in other parts of the world) would involve fraud and identity theft. If you were to text me, thinking I was a dead relative and included a social security number, I can ignore it and be completely within the law. If I used it for the purposes of identity theft or fraud, or continued to impersonate a deceased person for those purposes, then an offense has occurred which may be prosecuted.
So any question about laws needs to specify a place. Different places have different laws and regulations.
But if someone dies or changes their phone number and you were to send sensitive information there, too bad. That’s on you, they didn’t do anything wrong.
>how can you know that and avoid texting this new person sensitive information
You can’t. Number portability means a person doesn’t even have to die for a number to be reassigned to another person.
To illustrate, I’ll use my own personal example. My wife and I have paid for a cell phone for her mother (my mother-in-law) for a number of years now. Some of her doctors have that number as a contact number. She’s in her 90’s and is at the point where the cell phone is not needed. We’re considering giving up the number. When we do, that number will be reassigned to someone else. And yet, my mother-in-law will still be very much alive and even visiting some of those doctors.
It’s on the sender of the messages to ensure that the number they are sending the messages to is actually tied to the person they intend to receive those messages. Doctors often get around this by sending something along the lines of “Your latest results are available on your patient portal. Please call our office at [xxx-xxx-xxxx] if you have questions.”
If this is person to person communication, then perhaps messages like “This is OP. Give me a call when you get a chance. Thanks.” If the number has been reassigned, either you’ll get no answer or they’ll text back “new phone, who dis?”. Until you get confirmation though, you know to be careful about what you send.
A coworker passed away in an accident… one of his friends was bored one day and messaged his number with “ru there” several weeks after the incident . He got a simple “yes” and his phone rang but he didn’t answer and proceeded to block that number. I told my friend it was a missed opportunity, he should have asked for next week’s lottery numbers to prove it was him. Maybe my friend was worried he wanted to invite him participate on the football match in heaven next weekend.
The numbers are often not immediately recycled like that, the companies have huge batches of them and it’ll be quite a while before that number is ever re-issued, if at all. I live in the UK and have an 11 digit number, the first two describe “local” (i.e. not international) and “mobile” – so that’s 9 numbers as an identifier. That’s 10 billion different numbers (minus 1). For a country with 70m people. We could all have 100 phones, or a new number every year for 100 years, and still not need to duplicate numbers.
If the service ends because someone has died, it’ll likely be years before that number is ever re-used and the company may not even bother at all.
More importantly: Why would you ever text sensitive information?
What sensitive information would you be texting? There’s nothing illegal the receiver did by opening an SMS on their phone so it would be up to you to ensure nothing is texted that would get you or your organization in trouble.
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