Reply To: Fields Privacy Problem
This is a knowed bug, a bit forgotten over the time (2 years back !).
https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4821
@imath will look at this this week-end.
Follow the ticket to see progress, and eventually give feedback if asked for. Login on Trac uses same credentials as here.
That said, in your specific example, if a visitor knows the phone number of a registered user and try to search him on your site using that number, guess the relation between both is nearly familiar, so privacy is not a big problem, at least for them. 🙂
