131–140 of 393 posts
Handy tip: buy the cheapest pre-charged SIM and use it for this kind of verifications.
also: the phone companies allow you to receive SMS without putting a penny on them
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.
Mind sharing where? I've use my Google Voice number exclusively for 6 or 7 years now. Can't say I've ever ran into such a thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
No? I'm not clear on what the real point of this question is - twitter is a terrible platform to use for actual communication. Their sorting by "relevance" can cause recent messages to get lost in the shuffle and randomly mess with your visibility. It may be you're considering twitter as a business in which to coordinate product sales, but I'll assume it's for customer relations management, many companies that have a…
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.
This is the new norm... expect all services to require phone numbers due to spam and propaganda.
We're going this way as well (requiring & verifying phone numbers, not locking accounts). We don't have a problem with bots, but users in the "not so tech savvy" segment tend to switch/discard/forget their email address. Rather than try to recover their account with us, this group will subsequently just create a new one, and then wonder & complain that their profiles/settings/content/histories aren't carried over. We…
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…
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.
Oh my god, paid Twitter would be amazing. Well, then again, something awful was a paid forum iirc, and it was still a den of villainy.
The other component is that once they have the phone number, they can do anything with it they want, unless you leave the network. E.g. facebook once did the same, they required phone numbers "for two factor authentication". They promised to not use the numbers for anything else. A few years later they started sending SMS spam to users about what their friends did on facebook, and now facebook users can enter the num…
That's not even enough anymore. You also have to make sure that every one of your contacts do not upload their address book to conveniently find friends like you who may or may not be on the network. And that they don't tag you in images, events, etc.
You're an entry in the Facebook database, whether you have or have had an active profile or not.