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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

> An individual has a phone number

> Some people do not own phones, or do not wish to provide you with their telephone number when asked. Do not require a user to provide a phone number unless it is essential, and whenever possible try and provide a fallback to accommodate these users.

Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram are spectacular design failures on this point because they assume that every person has a phone number and also that every person has their own private (non-shared) and unique phone number. Facebook, Google, etc., require a phone number for verification and believe that it’s sufficiently adequate to thwart spammers.

The whole “must enter a phone number” phenomenon is a big mess, introduces privacy issues and excludes many people. None of the companies mentioned above would agree that excluding people is a goal for them, but they’ve made it so.

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What pisses me off to no end is the local (very popular) app Vipps for sending other people cash, e.g. to split a bill or buy something at a garage sale or whatever. Not only does it use phone numbers to identify the people you send money to, but it explicitly disallows two people with different phone numbers to have a shared bank account. Husband and wife with common debit account? Sorry, unsupported. WTF? What happens if someone switches bank (and thus account number) or phone number? Who knows, maybe you sent money to a stranger. This app is made by the banks.

I don’t think bank account numbers are re-used. So in that case the transaction would just fail. And no one changes phone number in Norway. With a few exceptions of course.

Ah, but it's precisely this types of assumptions/disregard of "just a few exceptions" that we as programmers should avoid, as per TFA.

> Signal

As I understand it, Signal is always intended to be the "StartTLS" of telephone communication, so naturally it explicitly targets mobile phone users. I only use Signal to call or text someone I would otherwise call directly.

But I agree with your general opinion. For most services I found it's ridiculous to be hardlinked to my phone number. Why on Earth you have to expose your phone number to some random people you chat with on the Internet?! Telegram... at least they accept VoIP numbers...

I use other non-phone, general-purpose services, such as Matrix, to communicate with other people.

> Signal is always intended to be the "StartTLS" of telephone communication, so naturally it explicitly targets mobile phone users.

This doesn't make sense to me. If I have telephone service and the person I want to talk to also has telephone service, why do I want to use Signal to communicate from my telephone device to their telephone device? Aha! Because I want to communicate privately and the telephone service does not allow me to communicate privately. So why do I have telephone service? To allow me to use the service that doesn't use the telephone service?

This always struck me as a particularly poor argument. While it is true that most people have data services through their telephone provider, why do we want to encourage this behaviour. I mean, I could even understand implementing it initially out of convenience, but it's been years and they still haven't provided a means for authenticating with the service without using a means that will publicly identify you. As much as I wish to believe otherwise, I do not think this is unintentional :-( And if it's not unintentional, I'd really like to understand the reason.

You have a good point.

> I mean, I could even understand implementing it initially out of convenience, but it's been years and they still haven't provided a means for authenticating with the service without using a means that will publicly identify you. As much as I wish to believe otherwise, I do not think this is unintentional :-( And if it's not unintentional, I'd really like to understand the reason.

That’s precisely what bugs me about these platforms. They all want to create the “social graph” based on phone numbers without giving the option to the user on how they want to expose themselves and how they want to construct their social graph.

I agree fully. I've no clue why phone numbers a prerequisite for most email account providers or anything else I have to sign up for. There is no quicker way to make me bail on a signup flow that to demand something that has nothing to do with what I'm using. I barely use my phone as it is, so I'm excited to see what the world will look like for me when I finally eschew it!

Phone number is probably endured without thought by most people, it then makes their database hugely more valuable; matching phone numbers and email addresses must be a key link for profile matching for advertisers/law enforcement/government.

Many services need a process that makes it hard for spammers to create a large number of accounts. If getting that costs a small number of real customers who can't use your service, oh well, the need to fight spammers is objectively more important to them as long as there aren't too many real customers with such problems.

Requiring phone numbers is a system that works quite reasonable, as most people have a phone number, and it's not that easy (and certainly not free) for a spammer to get thousands of phone numbers to make thousands of fake identities.

>Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram are spectacular design failures on this point because they assume that every person has a phone number and also that every person has their own private (non-shared) and unique phone number.

No, most people have a phone number and for most people that's their own phone number. That was a tradeoff for them.

>Facebook, Google, etc., require a phone number for verification and believe that it’s sufficiently adequate to thwart spammers.

I am sure that it is one of the most effective ways to thwart spammers, but to say that it's all they do is laughable. What's an alternative, email address? Throwaway emails are a dime a dozen.

>None of the companies mentioned above would agree that excluding people is a goal for them, but they’ve made it so.

They've made excluding people a goal? Are you serious?

> No, most people have a phone number and for most people that's their own phone number. That was a tradeoff for them.

That’s a very first world observation, and even there, this would be quite shaky if actual numbers were known.

Also, I didn’t say or intend to mean that these companies made excluding people a goal. Their decisions, on the contrary, have resulted in that.

I'd argue that it's a reasonable tradeoff if you consider the users vs customers distinction. Many (most?) services want more users because they're either going to pay money directly or they are good targets for advertising. A first world user is valuable, a third world user - not so much (literally - if you look at costs for clickthroughs or user acquisition or ad revenue per user, there's easily a hundredfold difference). People who are poor enough to not have a phone of their own are probably not going to bring you much revenue, so it's no big deal if they can't access your service. I mean, a company isn't building that service to serve users, it's building that service only to earn money from these users.

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