The personal mobile phone number of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese - along with the numbers of several high-profile Australians in media and business - has been published on a publicly accessible third-party website, in what appears to be a widespread privacy breach.
The website, which we won’t name, uses AI to “crawl billions of webpages daily” and collates the contact details of millions of people from around the world. It appears to pull contact data from LinkedIn and other websites.
The Prime Minister’s number is publicly available and free to access via the website. How sure are we that these details are accurate? Well, we called the number. And got the personal voicemail of the PM:
“Hi you’ve rung Anthony Albanese, if this is a personal call leave a message, if it’s a media call ring [staffer and staffer number redacted]. Have a good day.”
So we left a message.
Jan Fran rings PM Anthony Albanese.
Turns out the PM isn’t the only one with his digits on display. The phone numbers of Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and NSW Premier Chris Minns are also publicly available on the site. All three got a call from Ette Media. On all three occasions, our calls went to voicemails where they each identified themselves. We did not leave a voice message for Morrison or Minns.
Here’s our call to Sussan Ley.
Next up, we called Opposition leader Sussan Ley.
And it doesn’t stop with politicians. The phone numbers and emails of media figures including the ABC’s Annabel Crabb, Network 10’s Hugh Riminton, and Seven’s Edwina Bartholomew are also on the website. As are the phone numbers of News Corp chair Michael Miller, Western Sydney University Vice-Chancellor George Williams, and philanthropist and Salaam Wealth managing director Talal Yassine.
We reached out to several of those mentioned and verified the mobile numbers we did not personally call. Presenter and journalist Hugh Riminton had no idea his mobile phone number was publicly available on the website.
How did we uncover this?
It all started with this text from a stranger.
The person - surprise surprise - had found our co-founder Antoinette Lattouf's personal phone number on this website. A series of text messages followed.
We signed up to this website (for free) and within five minutes we had found several high-profile people's phone numbers.
How did this happen?
Good question!
The third-party site uses AI to trawl business pages, company websites and social media platforms for contact details. The site also offers a Chrome extension marketing it as a way users can find emails and phone numbers on LinkedIn.
We reached out to LinkedIn who told Ette Media “there has been no data breach of LinkedIn.”
Instead, LinkedIn, which has 1.2 billion users, suggested that web scraping may have occurred - a process of extracting website data and converting it into a structured format.
