A couple of days ago an old long forgotten friend popped up apparently using Telegram now. Looking at the profile picture it became very clear that friend must have abandoned this phone number a while ago.
Not really a privacy issue for the new user, since this is his public avatar, but a nice reminder for this issue that phone number are ill suited as identifiers
Yes and no.. I think a resource like a phone number is better than the yahoo/etc email reallocation situation. So far it seems to be rarer that someone tries to get allocated a number to impersonate a previous owner's identity.
Not really a privacy issue for the new user, since this is his public avatar, but a nice reminder for this issue that phone number are ill suited as identifiers