Why you should save peoples real names in your phone book

It is no secret that Whats-App (and a lot of other Apps) collect their users phone books. Of course this data is analyzed, but we want to defend our-selfs, especially if we did not agree to give away our data to those companies.

Many people therefore ask their friend not to safe their real name together with their phone number. So those people got saved under some kind of pseudonym.

But this is actually a disadvantage. The data is brought together based on the phone number. So the attacker does not just know in whose address book those people appear, but also a lot of pseudonyms which often correlate in some way to the relationship those people have.

If instead just one single handle would be used and associated with the phone number this information would not be available to the attacker.

The real name is often a good such handle, since mostly it is already known to the phone company or at least some people would use it anyway (like parents) and it is also the easiest handle to use consequently.