I often recommend people to remove themselves from by other people’ uploaded contacts to facebook.
In my experience basically everything you remove here will be present so it can be worthy to remove (opt out) yourself of facebook’ social graphs.
Not sure where this should be on the website but we might want to get a section on data removal? Do’s and don’ts of how to remove your data online would be a good thing to share.
Not entirely sure if that will truly ever be effective, because we dont really know if Facebook/Meta is being maliciously incompetent with our data with the hopes of keeping more data points on us.
Also, FB/M doesnt know its processes anymore because of their move fast and break things kind of mentally. I’ve read somewhere that they’ve pretty much lost most of their internal documentation, implying that any current processes they have, such as removing your number might not be fully implemented internally because some older lost process could be still be keeping tabs with your number internally, clandestinely (perhaps also maliciously). I’ll try to link that article later (still at work).
Best way forward is to still do that contact removal but still have segregation of contacts via different phone numbers. Different numbers for banks/SMS 2FA (that you cant change) and social contacts.
I think it still could limit the connections facebook stores on your number. I don’t think this can harm you.
Number segregation is something I have tried to practise. I now only split up different services and have one number for friends, clients, family. Clients you may be able to split but for me personally, is quite impossible as I get most of my clients through my network.