On LandBids, seeing a seller's phone number now has to be earned.
LandBids is a marketplace, and on a marketplace the contact info is the product. A phone number sitting in the open is the whole thing given away for free. So this week the work was making sure you have to be who you say you are before you see how to reach a seller.
We wired authenticated contact reveal, added a real phone visibility option, and fixed phone visibility where it was leaking when it should not have been. Then we went underneath and fixed six MLS auth criticals, hardened three specific access paths, and added an internal-only guard so certain functions cannot be reached from outside at all. Boring plumbing. Also the difference between a real marketplace and a data leak with a logo.
The part I care about most is how we checked it. It is easy to write a permission change, watch the page load, and call it done. But the page loading tells you almost nothing, because you are logged in as yourself. The only honest test is running the change as the role it actually affects, the anonymous visitor who should be blocked, and confirming they get the door slammed. Green for you is not green for them.
We also built a comprehensive test harness and an audit plan around all of it, so the next change gets caught before a stranger finds the gap. On a product where the value is a phone number, access control is not a feature you bolt on later. It is the feature.
If your app hands out contact info or pricing, ask who can see it when they are not logged in. Then go check as that person, not as you.
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