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Comment by jlg23 | Hacker News Reader

> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.

Indeed. I live in a muslim country and here everyone uses dual-sim phones with 2 sims for the sole purpose of having 2 accounts at everything: one for the conservative part of the family, another for the modern.

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I used to have a Facebook list specifically for the conservative part of my family so I could block the more "out there" stuff I wrote on the platform.

However now I just let it rip. I'm not trying to be weird like I was in my 20s, and I also realize I don't need to self-censor as much as I thought I needed to.

This is true for security reasons too, i don't want to give my 2FA number to anyone or any website that i will use only once in a while

2FA by phone should be dead. SMS is insecure and I've deprecated it for all forms of communication with me. I use virtual numbers for all websites and banks that have stupid forced phone 2FA, including Facebook.

Sounds like a good idea. Virtual numbers from where?

Twilio is a good place to start and has a pretty feature-complete API. There are other alternatives as well.

Do note that some services aren't able to send SMS to virtual numbers in the US, for some reason. If that happens, try again with a virtual number in the UK or somewhere else, or if there is a voice call confirmation option that may also work for you as you can redirect the call programatically. Considering the phone numbers typically cost only $1/month each you can keep a few around to deal with this situation.

There's token based 2FA as well.

Yes, we know that. They were talking about 2FA over SMS.

How does having two sims help with that? I switch out my SIM when I travel internationally, but I am still logged into all my accounts.

Many accounts are tied to a phone number.

I still don't understand. Occasionally you need a phone number to sign up, but I've never needed a phone number to log in to something unless 2FA get triggered. But in any case, nobody else knows what phone number I used to create an account.

You often need two different phone numbers to create two different accounts on the same service. Otherwise you will get errors like "phone number already used, did you forget your password?".

Switching sims doesnt log me out of whatsapp either - as far as i can tell its totally optional whether i want to update my whatsapp number to my phone number or not.

Yes it’s true that switching sims doesn’t log you out, but if you decided to intentionally log out from account A and create a new account B, you would need a second SIM card, that’s what the parent comment was trying to explain.

Makes sense.

I use VoIP numbers for that, although I understand it's not an option for all countries.

Yes, but you can explicitly log out from your main account and then log into an alt account - as long as you’re not using the sim associated to your main account

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