Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 45 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers?

#31

Post by ac29 »

What I find most annoying is mandatory SMS confirmation for business accounts. We've got plenty of phones at work, but they cant receive text messages, so employees have to use personal cellphones to open accounts on these types of services.

If your site does this and doesn't offer a actual phone call option, see if you can do something about it. A company I opened an account with a couple weeks ago almost lost our business over this -- seemed very unprofessional. I can guess why this company requires verification, its an attempt to stop bots from signing up en masse to get the small free portion of the service (first X amount was free, if I could script creation and use of 100 free accounts, I'd never need to pay them).

Re: Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers?

#32

Post by closeparen »

Spam and abuse are much easier problems to solve when it's reasonably difficult to obtain a new identifier with a clean reputation.

As much as you may consider it your human right to open thousands of new untraceable accounts per second with full functionality at zero cost, humoring you requires bending over backwards and resorting to a cat-and-mouse arms race of probabilistic anti-spam and anti-bot techniques. As the adversaries get good, it becomes more and more attractive to just require a phone number (and block well-known bulk suppliers of anonymous phone numbers like Google Voice, Twilio, and Flowroute).

I think this is actually a pretty reasonable arrangement. Someone motivated to stay pseudonymous can obtain a handful of extra phone numbers in a way that would take some effort to connect to his real identity. It's better than drivers license scans or credit card verification.

I think the only realistic alternative would be a proof-of-work scheme. This could protect privacy better, while still making it inordinately difficult to overwhelm a site operator with millions of pseudonyms for the same person. But there are no real standards here. More people have SMS than BTC.

Re: Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers?

#33

Post by squarefoot »

Razengan wrote: post #16

Didn't Google spearhead this behavior? One of the biggest reasons I don't use Gmail.

How do you deal with spam? This is the one and only reason why I still use Gmail. Many years ago I tried IPCop plus a trainable spam filter addon; it worked well but required constant attention/tweaking because spam is a moving target, so in the end I gave up.

Re: Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers?

#34

Post by Hnrobert42 »

closeparen wrote: post #32

Spam and abuse are much easier problems to solve when it's reasonably difficult to obtain a new identifier with a clean reputation. As much as you may consider it your human right to open thousands of new untraceable accounts per second with full functionality at zero cost, humoring you requires bending over backwards and resorting to a cat-and-mouse arms race of probabilistic anti-spam and anti-bot techniques. As th…

Slow down there. Where's this hostility coming from? I would rather not give my phone number to companies either.

Re: Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers?

#36

Post by chrismcb »

k5hp wrote: post #2

Phone numbers are more convenient in contrary to email: every individual has only one phone number, which hardly ever changes. They consider the phone number as unique identifier of a user. Many websites think that lots of users have multiple emails and thus maybe sign up twice. Again, it's only about convenience.

Eh what? The are lots of people that have multiple phones.

Re: Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers?

#37

Post by amorphid »

closeparen wrote: post #32

Spam and abuse are much easier problems to solve when it's reasonably difficult to obtain a new identifier with a clean reputation. As much as you may consider it your human right to open thousands of new untraceable accounts per second with full functionality at zero cost, humoring you requires bending over backwards and resorting to a cat-and-mouse arms race of probabilistic anti-spam and anti-bot techniques. As th…

It is trivial to automate a fake phone number.

https://smsreceivefree.com

Re: Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers?

#38

Post by stephenr »

closeparen wrote: post #32

Spam and abuse are much easier problems to solve when it's reasonably difficult to obtain a new identifier with a clean reputation. As much as you may consider it your human right to open thousands of new untraceable accounts per second with full functionality at zero cost, humoring you requires bending over backwards and resorting to a cat-and-mouse arms race of probabilistic anti-spam and anti-bot techniques. As th…

> Someone motivated to stay pseudonymous can obtain a handful of extra phone numbers in a way that would take some effort to connect to his real identity.

So yet again, someone who is determined to beat the system (usually an abuser) can do it.

Someone who simply wants to prevent their personal information being disseminated to the entire planet when your database is breached, gets fucked.

Re: Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers?

#40

Post by Razengan »

squarefoot wrote: post #33
Razengan wrote: post #16

Didn't Google spearhead this behavior? One of the biggest reasons I don't use Gmail.

How do you deal with spam? This is the one and only reason why I still use Gmail. Many years ago I tried IPCop plus a trainable spam filter addon; it worked well but required constant attention/tweaking because spam is a moving target, so in the end I gave up.

I had Hotmail/Live/Outlook, Gmail and iCloud accounts at the time I started gravitating to iCloud (mostly because there I had gotten the exact address that I wanted, and convenient aliases), and at that time, the level of spam I got was the same on Gmail and iCloud: next to none.

In 7 years that I've been using it exclusively I must've seen barely 5-10 junk emails on the 2 iCloud accounts (6 addresses in all) that I use.

Poor Outlook on the other hand.. I check my old accounts for sentimental reasons once every few months, and they're still beleaguered by spam.

Post reply on HN