How to hide your phone number on Telegram & manage who can find you by your phone number

Telegram is a feature-rich instant messaging platform that is gaining users rapidly. Like WhatsApp, Telegram also uses a phone number to create a user account. However, unlike WhatsApp, Telegram allows users to hide their phone numbers completely. The other side will never get to know your phone number unless you share the same with them via Telegram’s privacy options.

Telegram offers the ability to set who can see your phone number. It also includes the privacy options to set who can find you by your phone number. If disabled, people won’t be able to find your profile and interact with you even if they have your phone number in their contacts (as long as you don’t have them on your contacts list).

Hide your phone number on Telegram

1. Open Telegram.
2. Open settings by tapping on the 3 bars and choosing Settings.
3. Navigate to Privacy and Security and then further to Phone Number.
4. Under “Who can see my phone number,” choose:
   • My contacts: Only allow people in your contacts (saved on your phone) to see your phone number.
   • Nobody: Hide your phone number from everybody.
     
   • Everybody: Make your phone number visible to everybody who starts chatting with you, just like WhatsApp.

Change who can find you by your phone number

Telegram allows you to keep your profile hidden and not easily discoverable by unknown people. Hence, it will enable you to limit the people who can discover your profile or chat with you even if they have your phone number. You can happily say bye-bye to spam messages from unknown people!

1. Open Phone Number settings on Telegram
   Follow the first three steps from the previous list.
2. Under “Who can find me by my number,” choose:
   • My Contacts: To only allow contacts saved on your phone to be able to find you on Telegram.
     
   • Everybody: To allow anybody who has your number saved in their contacts (or using the public link) to start a chat with you.

You can hide your contacts from Telegram to keep your Telegram profile even more private. Even the “My Contacts” option above will become redundant as Telegram won’t have your contacts to match against. Hence, nobody will be able to find you by your phone number.

Go to Telegram settings > Privacy and Security. Here, disable the toggle for “Sync Contacts“. Finally, tap on “Delete Synced Contacts” to delete the previously synced contacts from the Telegram servers.

The above settings will stop Telegram from syncing and uploading your contacts list to their servers. You can also disable the “Contacts” permission to Telegram at this point to make sure Telegram does not pick up your contacts due to a bug or if you press the sync button by mistake.