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Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

sucky.ninja

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

#171

Post by packet_nerd »

criddell wrote: post #135
packet_nerd wrote: post #118

My wife and I cancelled our phone services a while back to save money since we rarely if ever have to call anyone and just use messaging to keep in touch with each other and friends. What are people like us supposed to do? I do have a Google voice number, but I noticed one or two places recently that won't accept that anymore.

If there are enough people like you, I'm sure they'll find some way to accommodate you. Maybe they will accept a scan of your passport or ask for a bank account number or some other piece of data that makes it at least a tiny bit harder to open an account.

There has got to be a better way to do online identity as a society! The most promising ideas I've heard about are WebAuthn and Estonia's digital identity system. How long is it going to take to get out of the dark ages and get this right?

One thing I'm sure of, uploading a scan of my passport to every website is not an appealing thought. Besides the inconvenience, do I really want my passport spread around on dozens/hundreds of different high-value servers run by who-knows-who?

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

#172

Post by MiddleEndian »

packet_nerd wrote: post #118

My wife and I cancelled our phone services a while back to save money since we rarely if ever have to call anyone and just use messaging to keep in touch with each other and friends. What are people like us supposed to do? I do have a Google voice number, but I noticed one or two places recently that won't accept that anymore.

If I weren't so attached to my number I'd probably ditch phone service too. Do you have issues with Google Voice needing another phone number?

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

#173

Post by Carpetsmoker »

packet_nerd wrote: post #118

My wife and I cancelled our phone services a while back to save money since we rarely if ever have to call anyone and just use messaging to keep in touch with each other and friends. What are people like us supposed to do? I do have a Google voice number, but I noticed one or two places recently that won't accept that anymore.

I have a prepaid account, which is basically free after the initial investment, which is usually just a few €/$/£/etc.

If you're careful enough it can also be reasonably anonymous.

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

#174

Post by newnewpdro »

To add insult to injury, not only do they lock your account almost immediately after you've created it without a phone number - unless you managed to change its settings to not spam your email address you will now be locked out of changing the setting and they will send you spam nearly every day.

Attempting to stop the spam through the in-email link just brings you back to the "locked account give us a phone number" flow.

Twitter is trash.

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

#175

Post by seppin »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #173
packet_nerd wrote: post #118

My wife and I cancelled our phone services a while back to save money since we rarely if ever have to call anyone and just use messaging to keep in touch with each other and friends. What are people like us supposed to do? I do have a Google voice number, but I noticed one or two places recently that won't accept that anymore.

I have a prepaid account, which is basically free after the initial investment, which is usually just a few €/$/£/etc. If you're careful enough it can also be reasonably anonymous.

there is no real prepaid in the US, the closest is USMoble which is still around 20 US a month

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

#176

Post by rehemiau »

seppin wrote: post #175
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a prepaid account, which is basically free after the initial investment, which is usually just a few €/$/£/etc. If you're careful enough it can also be reasonably anonymous.

there is no real prepaid in the US, the closest is USMoble which is still around 20 US a month

"Land of the free"

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

#177

Post by ALittleLight »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #43

The article states and asks: > I had a new IP > I had a newly installed operating system and browser. > What exactly about my behavior is unusual? It's not that this behavior is unusual (though, it is), it's that this behavior looks exactly like a bot. It's sad, but this is the state of the world now. If you're a big actor like Twitter, you end up blocking anything that looks like a bot, with an escape hatch a user c…

Why not just captchas and a classifier looking for bots in the sign up process? That, plus better detection and removal of bots seems like a "good enough" option that wouldn't inconvenience real users.

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

#178

Post by inopinatus »

hnzix wrote: post #165
inopinatus wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a general problem even if the phone number is not the username and is not limited to phone numbers, but also any data that is referenceable by email addresses, which is to say almost every unit of PII in almost every online system that exists today.

The implication being that if a system requires a verified phone number to use, then breaches are intimately tied to an individual's real identity. This is far less true of email addresses.

Your remarks only make sense to me if you're trying to remain entirely anonymous on a fetish dating system whilst simultaneously disclosing personally identifying information for reasonable use, and I can't reconcile these two objectives.

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

#179

Post by syshum »

anigbrowl wrote: post #127
apo wrote: post #86

Linking pseudonyms from two different networks (in this case, Twitter and the phone system) together is a classic and serious privacy leak. It's far from clear exactly what information Twitter, in its longtime effort to combat spam, has already collected on its users. Throwing a phone number into the mix expands to range of activities that can be unambiguously tied to the same individual. Given that Twitter certainly…

Twitter knows what IP you connect from, which might easily be through a VPN. The flip side of low-friction authentication is epidemic abuse by trolls, which arguably damages Twitter's brand. Unfortunately, most people simply don't understand the implications of any of this. Well, so you say.

>> epidemic abuse by trolls,

I am soo tried of hearing this excuse for mass censorship

First of it MASSIVELY over used to the point where people call anyone that disagrees with them "a troll" or a bot.

Twitter is hurting their own brand by their obvious political bias and selective enforcement of rules largely dependent on outrage mobs to "report" rule violations.

Like real names policies before it, these types of "verification" scheme do little to curb actual abuse, and in many cases shuts out moderate voices

Twitter is already quickly heading off a cliff where 2 political extremes are left yelling past each other (not actually communicating or discussing anything), and this policy will do nothing to change that

//disclosure, I have never, and will never have a twitter account

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

#180

Post by kgwxd »

interwho wrote: post #166

They also aren't allowing "throwaway" VoIP numbers, so you can't even mask your main phone number - I tried signing up with both a Twilio number and a TextNow number and both failed with a "This number is not supported" error. I ended up opening a support ticket and they allowed me to bypass that requirement only after I explained that I don't have a traditional phone number.

Did they require any more PII to do it over the phone?
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