alt Hacker NewsIt really bothers me that every dick and jane website has normalized asking for your personal phone number. It's the first thing they ask when you sign up. At this point your phone number has become your social security number of the internet.
I don't care if fighting fraud is hard for you. Figure it out without stripping away my privacy.
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I enjoy Apple's Hide My Email, and it would be nice to have a similar Hide My Phone Number.
"fighting fraud" - never engage with these excuses. It's never been about fraud. It's always been about collecting and selling your data.
Yeah, phone numbers are essentially KYC. I use a phone number verification site, but I can't recommend them because they stopped accepting Monero recently.
For long term numbers I would use jmp.chat.
> It really bothers me that every dick and jane website has normalized asking for your personal phone number.
The most a website will get from me is a unique email address and a bogus phone number. If it insists on verifying that phone number, it loses my business.
A lot of them also block voip numbers. This is obviously just a way to collect cell numbers that are easy to send spam SMS messages to.
I agree with this. They should have to keep some insane bond for every phone number they keep to pay out when there is a data leak.
and then they lock it in harder by using it for 2-or-more-factor authentication
apple has dark patterns for this, trying to get your phone number into their system. You have to do something like "other options" then "don't upgrade security" or something.
Just get a second phone number for all these websites
It's super annoying, because it's normally also a path for account recovery. So if you need to change your number, good luck remembering where you have signed up with it.
> It's the first thing they ask when you sign up.
It can still be worse. Imagine this: you create an account. You can use the service's free tier. You decide to pay, so you enter your name, address, and credit card number. You get charged. Then you download their app to use the service, you trigger their OAuth flow and... it requires you to enter a phone number, not letting you use your subscription for which you already paid for without a phone number. Oh and, bonus points: you can't delete your credit card information from their system. There's no reachable human customer support, and the only way to delete your CC information from their system is to delete your whole account.
Now, which service I'm talking about? OpenAI's ChatGPT Pro, or more specifically, their Codex subscription. You can subscribe to their ChatGPT Pro for $200 no problem, no phone number is necessary, but you can't actually use it in Codex without a phone number as the OAuth flow requires you to enter one. And how do I know this? Well, I'm sure you can guess... :P