Your phone company already stores far more information about you than your phone listing makes available to the public. The only additional piece of information they'd need to store would be a public key, which could be a dedicated key that you use ONLY for phone authentication, and which would do no identity thief any use unless they also possessed your matching secret key.
If anything, the need for that key to authenticate you for subscription purposes would strengthen your protection against identity theft. Cracking a 2048-bit public key by brute force is so computationally infeasible that, if you could capture all the rest of the Sun's output for the rest of its stellar lifecycle and dedicate all of that energy to the task, you could not exhaust the entire keyspace. Barring completely revolutionary new mathematical attacks, properly-constructed 2048-bit public-key encryption is, for all even remotely practical purposes, unbreakable.
no subject
Your phone company already stores far more information about you than your phone listing makes available to the public. The only additional piece of information they'd need to store would be a public key, which could be a dedicated key that you use ONLY for phone authentication, and which would do no identity thief any use unless they also possessed your matching secret key.
If anything, the need for that key to authenticate you for subscription purposes would strengthen your protection against identity theft. Cracking a 2048-bit public key by brute force is so computationally infeasible that, if you could capture all the rest of the Sun's output for the rest of its stellar lifecycle and dedicate all of that energy to the task, you could not exhaust the entire keyspace. Barring completely revolutionary new mathematical attacks, properly-constructed 2048-bit public-key encryption is, for all even remotely practical purposes, unbreakable.