161–170 of 393 posts
Handy tip: buy the cheapest pre-charged SIM and use it for this kind of verifications.
in the UK you can wander into any phone shop and get 5 SIMs for free also: the phone companies allow you to receive SMS without putting a penny on them
That's fair. If you don't like it - go away.
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…
Right now that may be the case but, I'm curious if this might cause some small nation with an international code to succumb to the massive amounts of money spammers will start offering for large banks of phone numbers... Looking at you British India Ocean Territories...
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>The broader point is that collection of phone number isn't intrinsically a bad thing Phone numbers as usernames is intrinsically bad for user data security at the meta level. If a service requires a verified phone number to signup, it becomes a de-facto username. Let's say a fetish dating site is partially breached, and the usernames are emails. Now your let's say your database is fullly breached, with the usernames…
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.
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 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.
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This is why you should block ads and trackers even if you're not a Facebook user. I have blocked all their domains in my hosts file also.
Would you mind sharing the hosts file for blocking FB and all of their domains? I've done this too in the past, but my list seems outdated for a while now.
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…
Hasn't that battle been lost for a while now though? How many different services have linked phone numbers with email or some other handle? (Particularly for 2FA)
On the few accounts I've been required to use that require a phone number, I've given them one. It just happens to be one from a modem phone pool.
I'll worry about what problem that may cause when it becomes one. Usually, these are for stupid things required for some project or another and the need for them is time-limited. I will not use FB, and have a pile of Twitter accounts with no phone numbers attached if I ever have reason to care about that.
And at the rate we're destroying trust in the phone system with spam, I don't think anyone will expect pickups in a few more years.
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…