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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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?
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