Live data from Hacker News

Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

sucky.ninja

91–100 of 393 posts

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#91
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked in banking we would do this with suspect transactions. The feature was called “Strategic Delay”. After awhile, all of our project plans (this was back in the days of Gantt charts) would include two weeks of effort on “Strategic Delay”, even if that feature wasn’t involved.

This is slightly different though, twitter is silly and unnecessary - access to your money is not. During some of the recent shows highlighting issues with payday lending these sorts of strategic delays were mentioned in the light that they can cause irregularly paid workers to have problems actually getting money out of their paycheck - forcing them into more borrowing until they are able to clear their checks. Agai…

> twitter is just sillines

Would you say the same about your phone number? If not, why? If I run my business on Twitter (or YouTube, or Facebook) is it that different from a bank?

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#93
post #84
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happens to me too, only when linked from HN.

Ahh, so rate limit by referer? That's weird. I wonder why. Almost guarantees viral events make Twitter look broken. I mostly only navigate to Twitter from here, so I didn't make that connection.

> Ahh, so rate limit by referer?

I don't know. Maybe they just don't like HN and this is a better way of saying it than a photo of a testicle.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#94
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked in banking we would do this with suspect transactions. The feature was called “Strategic Delay”. After awhile, all of our project plans (this was back in the days of Gantt charts) would include two weeks of effort on “Strategic Delay”, even if that feature wasn’t involved.

This is slightly different though, twitter is silly and unnecessary - access to your money is not. During some of the recent shows highlighting issues with payday lending these sorts of strategic delays were mentioned in the light that they can cause irregularly paid workers to have problems actually getting money out of their paycheck - forcing them into more borrowing until they are able to clear their checks. Agai…

Very common in banking is a situation where you deposit a check, but the bank puts a 2- to 5-business-day hold on availability of the funds until the check clears. They might do this if it's not a local bank, or if for whatever reason they have a doubt about the check clearing.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#95
post #65
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still allows geolocation. But one can lease hosted SIMs. Actual SIMs in server farms. So they're "real" mobile numbers. Just not located where you are.

>That still allows geolocation. I doubt twitter is going to get your cell tower location just from your phone number. Sure, the cell provider has it and is probably keeping it around, but unless you attract significant attention to yourself (eg. bomb threat), it's not going to be disclosed. If you're really paranoid you can use it a few blocks away from your usual location.

Um wasn’t there a case where one of the big 3 providers in US was selling real time location data?

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#96
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to ignore that this constrains abusers as much as it does legitimate users. Collective punishment in order to mitigate abuse by a few is the wrong way to go.

This is, you might say, not just an important problem in society, but the only problem in society. "Why do I need a driver's license? It's just bureaucracy and a revenue collection scam." Except, when you don't test drivers or provide a mechanism for taking bad drivers off the road, a few bad people spoil it for everyone. And so on, and so forth. That is not a justification for any one thing like this, but the genera…

There are two ways of dealing with the issue. You can default-deny, like only allowing people to drive after a test, or you can default-allow, like just like anything else.

We usually use default-deny only where the severity of bad behavior is very high. That's because it has a high cost for both most people and the test-issuers, and it has a very high cost to the few people caught as false positives. It is a very damaging mode for society. We are also migrating into only using default-deny on the internet, even on consequence-less contexts, and the previous paragraph still applies.

We may get a better world if we take some of the privacy away from the network level, we may even get to keep more of it overall.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#97
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is slightly different though, twitter is silly and unnecessary - access to your money is not. During some of the recent shows highlighting issues with payday lending these sorts of strategic delays were mentioned in the light that they can cause irregularly paid workers to have problems actually getting money out of their paycheck - forcing them into more borrowing until they are able to clear their checks. Agai…

> twitter is just sillines Would you say the same about your phone number? If not, why? If I run my business on Twitter (or YouTube, or Facebook) is it that different from a bank?

If you are running a business on Twitter, I don't see a big issue with having a phone number connected to that Twitter account. It doesn't strike me as unreasonable.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I would rather pay them some fee. But they don't seem to want to monetize their service via user fees.

Seems like it would make a lot of sense for them to offer both options; either would discourage bots, and you'd give people the choice whether to go the free route or the privacy-conscious route

[deleted]

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#99

This is the new norm... expect all services to require phone numbers due to spam and propaganda.

spam and propaganda When they tell you it's not about the money... it's about the money. When they tell you they want your phone number for anything other than making more money... it's about the money. Edit: -4, huh? Really? Have people forgotten what Facebook just did? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/you-gave-facebook-your...

???

Of course it's about the money.

I'm not the CFO at Twitter or anything, but even I can see that spam and propaganda cost those guys a lot of money. The number of advertisers who stop paying Twitter because of spam will be orders of magnitude larger than the number of advertisers who stop using Twitter because of phone numbers.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#100
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

spam and propaganda When they tell you it's not about the money... it's about the money. When they tell you they want your phone number for anything other than making more money... it's about the money. Edit: -4, huh? Really? Have people forgotten what Facebook just did? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/you-gave-facebook-your...

??? Of course it's about the money. I'm not the CFO at Twitter or anything, but even I can see that spam and propaganda cost those guys a lot of money. The number of advertisers who stop paying Twitter because of spam will be orders of magnitude larger than the number of advertisers who stop using Twitter because of phone numbers.

I think you know what I mean.
Post reply on HN