It drives me nuts that 2FA is being expected by companies, and yet they're not providing employees with a phone. If you do want me to use 2FA, provide me with a device I can do it from. I do not use my personal devices for work.
Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a missed opportunity after all these years. Nobody's tried to go into the business of "verifying individual humans" and succeeded? Seems like that could and should be just a single facet of a very big online ID service. Basically something like Oauth but for real ID, where you can approve/deny requests for variable amounts of identifying information. It's not like all that information isn't floating a…
Lots of companies will verify individual humans, but they're all far too expensive to use free SaaS products.
As a single datapoint, Veriff [1] is one of the startups that's been working in this space for quite a few years and is fairly well established, their prices start from $1.50 per verification.
Re: Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
#13Isn't it purely about ID?
Uber/Ebay/WhatsApp don't want you behaving badly, getting kicked or low ratings and then just binning that login and starting over. Phone numbers (and banning prepaid or temp numbers) are the best way to make that hard and to link one actual human to one account.
I'd like to see some alternatives, but so far this is the easiest way to make sign up rapid/easy while still making sock-puppetry hard.
Re: Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
#14It drives me nuts that 2FA is being expected by companies, and yet they're not providing employees with a phone. If you do want me to use 2FA, provide me with a device I can do it from. I do not use my personal devices for work.
I have been holding the company ipad hostage since the day I joined. I need it for work and either you pay for the device or I keep this ipad till I leave.
They said that they will give me the ipad till I got a functioning Android/ios phone on my own cost. Why would I do that? Anything in company property needs to be signed off to them. There is only one app on there: Okta
Re: Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
#15It drives me nuts that 2FA is being expected by companies, and yet they're not providing employees with a phone. If you do want me to use 2FA, provide me with a device I can do it from. I do not use my personal devices for work.
I’m the only one at my company who uses a USB key for 2FA. Zero interest in an app on my personal device.
Re: Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
#16I am not sure why you do not use Google Voice. I have been using it for 9 years now. I have a OBi202 box attached, so I can use a normal hand set. It is our house phone. Yeah back in the day, people had one phone in the house and everyone shared it. But google voice I can use the box or my laptop to answer, it takes voice messages, and text messages. All in all a GREAT service.
I have a GV number, but one problem is that it has been broken, for many people, on Android for over a year. It works only for outgoing calls, failing to ring on incoming calls.
Re: Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
#17While this is a major problem for people in your situation, there are no other reliable ways to identify a person and ensure one account per user.
Why are phone numbers being viewed as the single source of truth? What's to stop someone from having a second phone number?
There is nothing that is absolutely categorically capable of singularly identifying an individual natural person except that person’s physical body and even then biometrics need to be carefully created.
Everything else has a statistical probability of correlating with a natural person. The probability of phone numbers as identification is good enough. In fact it is great.
All or nothing reasoning is incorrect. It is only useful when you need to capture literally every case, which isn’t the problem here.
Re: Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
#18The better solution is to link verified phone numbers in one account. You would need access to both numbers simultaneously of course.
However since this is non-trivial to implement as it requires indirection wherever authentication is performed or identity is asserted, requiring fundamental architectural change for most platforms, the engineering cost vs marketing benefit applies.
So the priority level “MUST” is questionable since almost no one has this problem. It is more likely that the solution will be an ever increasing number of cell companies will have agreements for international roaming.
Re: Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
#19Are you from a first world country? It sounds like you're from a first world country! There's a legitimate reason to use phone numbers - email hasn't worked in many third world countries such as India. But everyone understands and has a mobile phone already, and thus it becomes perfectly manageable. This is why whatsapp succeeded, they zeroed in on the phone number (and the OTP instead of an account) as a way to authenticate and identify users. If someone's in your contact list, you instantly can connect with them! The level of integration of whatsapp into every aspect of the average indians life is insane and incomparable to what you might see with email or any tech software idea in a place like the US.
Furthermore, almost no service in India uses passwords, everyone uses OTPs. And initially people were not aware and there were lots of social engineering fraud, but now everyone knows not to share OTPs with others, and frankly this looks like a far more secure method than the password based auth systems prevalent in the western world.
Further there's an even bigger incentive in places like India - easy control of spam. I am not aware of any easy method to procure phone numbers here without linking it to your identity, so it becomes much harder for spam account creation. You could call this draconian but I don't see any problem with this behavior from the company's perspective.
Re: Companies must stop requiring people to link their phone numbers
#20Apparently I have to resurrect an old t-mobile to gain access to my credit karma account. I'm not sure this is even possible. Customer service seems to have a language problem Do I just lose my account in this case? What do people do about this sort of thing?