Share a public handle (their username) on social media or websites without exposing their personal contact information.
Shift in Discovery: While contact syncing by phone number remained a feature for finding known friends, usernames became the preferred method for discovering and interacting with people outside one's immediate phone contacts.
3. Granular Phone Number Privacy Settings (Evolving Over Time): User Control
"Who can see my phone number?": Telegram progressively refined its privacy settings, offering users more control. The introduction of "Nobody," "My Contacts," and "Everybody" options for phone number visibility gave users explicit power over who could see their contact details on their profile.
"Who can find me by my number?": A further refinement allowed users to control who could find their profile by searching for their phone number, even if the number wasn't visible on their profile. This separated visibility from discoverability.
Default to Private: While the initial default might have been more permissive, Telegram gradually encouraged users to opt for stricter settings, with "My Contacts" or "Nobody" becoming the recommended telegram number database choices for privacy.
Non-Communicative Use: Telegram Passport allowed users to securely store their real-life identification documents (e.g., passports, driver's licenses) encrypted in the Telegram cloud. While this data is linked to the user's account (and thus ultimately their phone number), Telegram stated it had no access to the encrypted data itself.
Purpose: The idea was to streamline KYC (Know Your Customer) processes for third-party services (e.g., crypto exchanges) that required identity verification, allowing users to share verified documents with those services directly from Telegram with their permission. This is a non-communicative use of the phone number as an account anchor for secure document storage.