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Comment by durnygbur | Hacker News Reader

Every time Facebook/Gmail/Google/Amazon/LinkedIn/Tinder/whoever asks me to give them phone number "just in case" my first and only thought is "hell no". I haven't been wrong a single time.

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Let's not forget the notable case of Twitter "accidentally" using your provided phone number for advertising purposes [0], and to this day still banning you after registration if you refuse to give it.

[0]. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally...

Twitter also had staff who leaked Twitter account PII from the Twitter DB to spies from the Saudi government, who have a habit of killing journalists from time to time.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud...

Collecting this data is an accident (or murder?) waiting to happen.

Twitter is especially silly in that regard. The info page on why my account was banned implied that one of my tweets violated the community guidelines - although I never tweeted anything.

Even more frustratingly, there is a form to appeal a ban. After filling out that form, I got a confirmation mail stating that Twitter will "respond as soon as possible", or in other words, never.

I do not understand why they bothered to implement all that hijinks to waste my time. Simply disallowing signups without phone number would have been much simpler and less dishonest.

Facebook did this as well.

Haven't given them my number on any of my twitter accounts. Where does this banning rumor come from?

I had that experience, maybe they are more forgiving to IPs coming from certain countries or locations. IPs from my country tend to be treated as suspicious (not as bad as Tor but bad enough to be an annoyance) so as soon as I registered ok Twitter I got a notice about "suspicious activity" and about having to validate a phone number to be able to use the account. At that time (2015 I think, I don't have the account anymore) you could get around that by contacting support, explaining that you don't have a phone number and waiting a few days for them to manually unlock the account.

Edit: this happens with Google and Yandex as well, requiring phone number to sign up (Yandex can unlock you if you contact support). Microsoft isn't as bad and can work with just a secondary email instead of a phone number. Also the whole country is banned from downloading the Lynx web browser at https://lynx.invisible-island.net/

>as soon as I registered ok Twitter I got a notice about "suspicious activity" and about having to validate a phone number to be able to use the account. At that time (2015 I think, I don't have the account anymore) you could get around that by contacting support, explaining that you don't have a phone number and waiting a few days for them to manually unlock the account.

Same thing happened to me last year in the US. The kicker was that they automatically opt you in to product update, daily digest, etc. emails. But those emails don't have a 1-click unsubscribe - the unsubscribe link takes you to your account settings, which you can't access when your account is disabled. So you can't unsubscribe from the emails or delete the account.

You can either add a phone number to stop the spam, or search around to find the page where you can submit a ticket (because there's not a support link on the disabled account page) and hope someone gets to it eventually. They never even replied to my ticket, they just silently unlocked the account after a week or two.

I’ve been using Twitter to follow some people who don’t have blogs etc since last May, and haven’t been banned yet.

Lots of likes, no RTs or posts though.

Sadly, many companies now require a phone number to use their services. For example: Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, social networks like Instagram and Vk. They don't like anonymous users. For some users, Google requires a phone number to sign up. Twitter requires a phone number if they see something "suspicious" in user's behaviour.

I feel like saying "after you!". What's that Google? No phone number? Oh...

Not to mention whatsapp is actually broken. It's bound to your phone number and can't change it. If you change SIM, your account is wiped. AND the worst: your contacts are not notified so if they send a message to the old number, it will just silently fail. Absolutely horrible. I never understood how whatsapp could be phone-number bound and not account bound like everything else out there.

I've been using a MySudo phone number to use for signups when I'm forced to give out one. Has reduced the noise i get in my messages for my real number

https://mysudo.com

Are they not blocked for being VoIP?

I've only run into one instance where they wanted a real number. (Coinbase) I think sites only block those when there's a reason to.

If my banks are all willing to use my Google voice number, then any other site should be willing to as well. And yet, most websites that want a phone number won't take it. My GV account is in use for WF, Discover, PayPal, Steam, and it was previously in use at BofA when I had an account with them.

It's crazy the a phone number is a secret. The problem isn't having the phone numbers; it's all the terrible systems that only work if phone numbers are secret.

Phone numbers are not secret. These service ask for it mostly to be sure to get the right one (checking is expensive) and/or to have plausible deniability of your contentment when they abuse it later.

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