Comment by jitix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jitix | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Its a market positioning thing. I will pay platforms that reduce my daily friction over those that don’t. You may not. The overall market sentiment will determine which companies win.

I’m saying this as someone who moved 100% off of public cloud storage recently and who has self hosted my own email from 2010 to 2017.

Phone numbers is one thing where I want less privacy. I personally can vet but it’s still super annoying. Non technical users fall for scams all the time. I literally want people’s IDs be linked to phone numbers. I’m literally TIRED of screening calls even though Apple made it easier recently.

Agree to disagree, sorry.

Edit: I want every phone number calling me to be linked with a physical ID and address (whether individual or legal entity) and accessible via a single button tap. In 2026 there is no reason for someone to call someone anonymously.

As someone who also self-hosts, I absolutely do not want phone numbers tied to verifiable personal information. Why? Because then every major "service" will make phone registration a requirement. It's bad enough as it is.

Look around, its basicaly impossible to sign up or freaking buy something online without handing over all your most personal information, even when they literally never call you.

that hack I've wanted to do is to set up myself as a phone company and then be able to give out different phone numbers to different people so that if only one person has that phone number than I know where that phone number got leaked from. if it is being handled digitally and everything gets forwards, calls to 0001 are from my family, 0002 is friends 0003 is work, 0004 and up are given to each business that wants to contact me. If 0042 gets called by a company that isn't the one I signed up 0042 with, then I know their database leaked.

There aren't enough phone numbers to make this work. There are only ~5.7B phone numbers in the NANP that can be assigned to individuals [1] and these countries have >400M people, so it's just ~14 phone numbers per person. Which works if we each have a couple, but not if we start handing out many per person.

[1] 10B ten-digit numbers, less prohibited ones like area codes starting with 0 or 1, the 555 exchange, etc.

Sigh. Yes, you're right. Like IPv4 address space and private jets, it's a limited resource and it won't work the same as you can do for email addresses. Though, maybe adding an office extension number to it might work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com