As a casual user, can someone explain the implications for me? They seem to have my username and phone number combo; can they use these for nefarious purposes?
Among other things, it means that the cell phones of people who have predictable user names are now very easy to discover. I don't use SnapChat, but if I did I would be patio11 on it. My cell is fairly closely guarded. You could imagine some people with similar situations who'd be at higher risk of misuse, because of a higher public profile, higher perceived payoff for contacting, notoriety, or demographic interest to people with poor impulse control.
If you're not a hot underage teen girl, then prob not. But now it blows up the spot for where a lot of teens are hanging out. Now it's another step to getting to you if some creep wants to. Or take it to a grander scale, it creates a viable link of who a person and their digital mask is.
That's kind of the thing about privacy. It's kind of slipping away, but if you don't care that it is then it's prob cause it doesn't matter to you yet.
If you're playing anonymous, you surely would also use burner phones and not your main phone for that purpose. Same applies to identities, profiles and hardware, any IDs, network connection and so on.
Because if I do have an alias, which is doing very shady things. I would make it pretty sure, it's not going to be that easy to get it. When doing stuff like that you want to be sure that there's "shared nothing" approach. So if they hack your systems, your primary system won't contain any information referring to the shady side and vise versa.
