I understand… no online data is ever 100% safe, but a phone number is not much of a security issue like a SSN would be, and most phone companies are already selling your phone numbers to marketers anyway. If people are that paranoid about their phone numbers and emails, then they shouldn’t even be online at all. Most hackers are much more interested in accessing email accounts so they can send their spam, so they best thing you can do is to set it up so that all your WordPress users are forced to use very strong passwords, and never use “admin” as the user name for your admin account.
Also, if you are requiring users to be logged in, then the fields on the sign-up forms will be pre-filled, so they won’t have to type them in each time.
Wordpress and this plugin are open source, so you could freely modify the plugin to make the phone field not required, or to remove it entirely. Any one with just a little bit of PHP knowledge could easily make those changes.
Again, though, I will definitely keep this in mind as a potential future option, and this one wouldn’t be too much work to implement. I obviously can’t implement every single feature request, as the plugin would become unwieldy and be too confusing with the amount of settings/options needed to implement everything. That’s why I set up this new feature request forum, as an easy way for me to keep track of feature requests, and eventually pick the most popular ones if and when I decide to include more features.
At the same time, any body is free to take this plugin and fork it into an entirely new plugin, as that’s originally how this plugin got started (a modification of an existing plugin to fit the needs of our school’s PTA site).