ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,554,878, issued on Feb. 17, was assigned to WhatsApp LLC (Menlo Park, Calif.).
"Phone number obfuscation in social media platforms" was invented by Kanak Behari Agarwal (Austin, Texas).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods, systems, and storage media for obscuring a user identifier on a social media platform are disclosed. Exemplary implementations may: register a client device based on a user identifier; generate an internal supplemental identifier associated with the user identifier; receive a confirmation of the SMS message from the client device based on the user identifier; implement the internal supplemental identifier between clie...