Tell HN: A government ID card is required to use ChatGPT in Germany | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: A government ID card is required to use ChatGPT in Germany

3 pointsSeyB9GGYW5zh23C4 comments

ChatGPT says "Please note that phone verification is required for signup.".

It's not possible to get a phone number without a government ID in Germany:

* There is a law which requires ID verification to buy SIM cards.

* For landline contracts, you need a bank account. Bank accounts also legally require ID verification.

It would be nice if developers of web services which require phone verification keep this on their mind and offer alternative options:

It's a legitimate privacy concern to not want every daily internet usage tied to your official personal ID.

This applies even more with conversational services such as ChatGPT which will possibly leak those private conversations into their training data and thus have them float around the Internet for an unpredictable eternity.

And here's info on the law with regards to bank accounts: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girokonto#Legitimationspr%C3%B...

The title is clickbait. Phones are only used to keep spam out or create quotas. OpenAI is far from being the first one doing it. Some services even use the number only once and then keep a hash of it

> and offer alternative options:

Do you have examples? Surely not credit card either. At least there are now a couple of proxies were one can use ChatCPT via VPN I guess.

> Do you have examples?

Require some kind of work from the user so automated mass account creation is non-trivial. Preventing that was the initial point of phone verification anyway.

Whether this is the classical CPU/GPU Proof-of-Work, or a manual thing such as solving CAPTCHAs, is up to your personal taste :)

In the specific example of ChatGPT, they would have an easy source of work at hand: Have users rate existing statements of ChatGPT as true/untrue. If someone tries to create an account and they rate too many as the opposite of their actual truth-value then they are a bot. If the same questions which pop up during account creation are then simultaneously fed as input using an existing account, then it's also a bot.

> Surely not credit card either. At least there are now a couple of proxies were one can use ChatCPT via VPN I guess.

How would that bypass the need for a phone number?

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