It’s not an accident. They’re not stupid. It is intentional. They want your personal information. Most of your personal information is tied to your email but it’s easy enough to spin up an alias to sign in with. Requiring a phone number ensures that they know exactly who you are and can buy/sell/use your data accordingly. They also know what a giant pain in the dick it is to change your phone number, especially when you need it for these security checks. They also know sales conversion rates are much higher if they can get you on the phone. So yeah, they’re not going to stop doing that.
I have absolutely no need for my phone number, nor do I use it for anything that I couldn’t use a voice app for. Just get rid of them altogether.
Yeah I mean I’d get rid of that and email entirely if I could but unfortunately there are legal and societal expectations.
Get married, then legally, you only need one lol.
You’ll pry email from my #coldDeadHands, but I haven’t had a phone number for a decade.
We need email. It’s one of the few protocols that are 100% in the user’s control. I run my own mail server. I can’t do the same for whatsapp.
We’ve added a lot of checks to email (SSL, DKIM, DMARC, SPF) so it’s very easy to identify spam these days. It’s also easy to avoid giving any two companies the same email address. That’s something much harder to avoid with a phone number.
For 2FA, per-account email addresses and authenticor apps are the best approach for privacy.
I run my own mail server. I can’t do the same for whatsapp.
No, but you can do the same for a wide variety of chat apps.
it’s very easy to identify spam these days
LOL then why is my inbox constantly full of spam?
Platforms like SimpleX solve spam by requiring participants to have an invitation to message you. You can either send them a 1-time invitation or you can use a semi-permanent one that can be posted publicly and rolled as necessary without losing contact with anyone you’ve already connected with, so by the time it’s mined somehow and sold to some company, it’s already changed.
For 2FA, per-account email addresses and authenticor apps are the best approach for privacy.
LOL what? No they’re not. How does an email protect your privacy over just a username?
LOL what? No they’re not. How does an email protect your privacy over just a username?
They said per-account email addresses, presumably meaning that when giving out an email address, you would use a different one for each service. That way, they couldn’t be used to link you across services, and you could easily delete one (and know who to blame) if it was abused.
Yes, I understand how email aliasing works. Again, how is that more private than a username?
I don’t see a claim of it being more private than a username. Perhaps the person you’re arguing with views them as equally private, or is thinking of services that require some form of contact info. I can’t speak for them.
It’s right here:
For 2FA, per-account email addresses and authenticor apps are the best approach for privacy.
I can’t speak for them.
But you just did.
Zoomer spotted, opinion rejected. Email >>>>> chat apps.
Zoomer spotted
Haha, not even close
Email >>>>> chat apps.
Wrong again. But please, do go on.
On this question of verification, I don’t have a particularly foolproof solution, but maybe there just isn’t one.
I can criticize the modern web for a lot of things, but as long as we have situations where we want to check whether an account is a real person, as opposed to FarmingBot #295038, they need something. I’m not a fan of phone verification, but I’d only criticize it when we have alternatives.
I’d even be in favor of some kind of one-way algorithm by which a trusted real-person-identifying entity could tell a random third party site: Yes, this is a genuine human.
https://www.oesterreich.gv.at/en/id-austria.html
That exists and is better than a phone number.
Cool, now provide solutions that exist today for every other country
That is not my responsibility ;) I just shared that something like that exists.
The technology has existed since the 80s.
X509 certificates would allow a government agency to sign a digital identity indicating that it’s legitimate, would allow for remote revocation in the event of loss or theft, and can be easily integrated with every existing computer and browser.
An issued physical card would resemble a credit card, with a chip in it. Other physical form factors can take the shape of USB-devices which bundle the card and the reader into a single device.
In the real world:
Also https://www.cac.mil/Common-Access-Card/, if the Americans are skeptical.
I don’t like the Austrian one being phone-integrated, but I understand why people would want that.
- Phone numbers
- social security numbers
Stop making personal information into digital ids because when it inevitably ends up in some kind of data breach. These companies all throw their hands up saying sucks to be you.
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What I hate is when they want you to store “secret” information like your mother’s maiden name/ first pet name for later verifications. You know these are stored in plain text of course. My own damn government does this stupid shit, and they’ve had several hacks of PII including gun registrations because as far as I can tell, nobody competent works in government IT.
Security questions don’t care what you put in there. It’s not an exam. It’s basically just an alt password.
I just generate a string of alphanumeric text from my password generator and stuff those in there. If I lose my password vault somehow I’m cooked anyway, so.
I use bullshit answers for these, and save them in the notes section of my password manager.
I choose random questions and store the random passwords that I use as answers in my password manager. It’s also more secure because people can’t just Facebook stalk you for answers.
Yeah, just generate a unique ID and ask only for the information you actually need.
I’ve been considering getting a pager or a burner phone just for this
Just get a virtual DID number from something like Voip.ms or virtualphone. There may be other providers out there that use crypto for payment for added privacy, but if all you want to do is be able to keep your real phone # off the grid, these work.
usually they check for VOIP numbers and give you an error. Has to be legit.
Never had that problem with the Google voice service
Yeah yeah it’s google, but it gives numbers that work
Last time I checked, Google Voice is only available for US residents. Not sure if there’s alternative.
Google voice is hit or miss. It’s worked for a lot of smaller sites for me, but the bigger / more corporate it is, the less likely it seems to work.
Can pagers receive text messages? I thought they are closed ecosystems, basically?
Most phones are dual Sim these days
Better to not associate this number to your main phone anyway. Less likelyhood to have the info stolen from you.
I don’t want to treat phone numbers as an ID, but for some reason my customers will give their phone number to me online far more willingly than they’ll cough up their email address, which is baffling only until you realize:
- Most people are technologically incompetent and are intimidated by the avalanche of crap they get in their email, and
- They never answer their phones anyway, so who cares?
I actually offer the option, because I don’t give a rat’s ass how people ignore me when I try to contact them. But when they place an order I at least need to be able to prove that I tried.
Yo sign me up 867-5309
When I give out my email, I always get spam, regardless of how many boxes I uncheck.
When I give out my phone number, sometimes I don’t
Of course that no longer makes sense since I have one phone number I can’t easily change, but give out uniquely generated emails that I can individually turn off
which is baffling only until you realize
I stopped being baffled when I realized most people are dumb as shit.
It’s just a fact of life, and we either see it or we don’t.
TBF many people are more intimidated by emails. My mum, for example, is in her 70s - she’s okay with using a smartphone but she doesn’t trust ‘internet stuff’. Won’t put her card details in, doesn’t trust emails - which is fair, because a lot of emails are bullshit or scams. She grew up with telephones though and feels safer using them. Possibly why so many phone scams target older people. I’ve tried to educate her.
This attitude doesn’t make people dumb. A bit ignorant, maybe, but I feel like ‘dumb as shit’ is a bit harsh.
Bane of my life as about a year ago my dad switched his sim and immediately started pestering me about not being able to log into his accounts.
Yes he got rid of the old number completly and expected me to somehow make his logins work. This is still going on to this day when he complains to me something doesn’t work it’s because he’s tied it to his old phone number.
Are internet security and internet privacy incompatible goals?
Yes. They are completely incompatible goals when anything relating to identity/being is linked to it. Examples of this could be anything from your name, to your behavioral patterns, to your phone number
Disregarding the entire possibility that ANY site is hack-able/breach-able, the issue stands that the reasons that most sites request PII is valid, for security reasons. There does not exist any valid method of ensuring users identity that does not violate users privacy. CAPTCHAS are proven inefficient, email domains are easy as a 1-2 click. Once the setup is done server side changing to a new address is as easy as changing your server settings and registering a new domain, then just pointing your MX records there. Heck depending on your postfix setup you might not even have to change server settings, if your account lookup is setup to ignore the domain and it all uses the same database. Even phone numbers have proven troublesome but its the least troublesome method available
The entire reason PII style setups are used, is because its an easy verification site side, but a hard to spoof verification customer side. Like the article says, phone numbers are hard to change for verification, many only let you change so many times in X period, and usually require some form of physical identity to register, and the ones who don’t are forced such as VOIP style numbers get blocked.
We lack currently a good system aside from that, because at the end of the day, how do you prove you are who you say you are, without disclosing your identity. I personally think it should be fine to give up some PII for security purposes, but this NEEDS to be restricted only to security and should never be shared with any entity, and this includes government overreach. Alas this will never happen.
This assumes a legitimate need to prove who you are outside the context of that specific site, rather than just within it. Sometimes that need is real, sometimes it is not.
When it’s not, and you only need to prove you are the same person who created the account, then a simple username and password is sufficient. Use 2FA (via authenticator app or key, NOT via SMS or email) on top of that. This allows users to prove to a sufficient degree that they are the owner of that account.
This is how most Lemmy instances work, for example. I can sign up by creating a username and password, with optional 2FA. They do not need my email. They do not need my phone number. They do not need my name, or my contacts, or anything else that is not related to my identity within their server.
I realize that this is untenable at large scales for any communications platform. Spam (and worse) is a problem wherever there are easy and anonymous signups. I’m honestly not sure how Lemmy is as clean as it is. I guess it’s just not popular enough to attract spammers.
You are correct with this comment yea, the biggest drawback (which as acknowledged we have seen on lemmy) is the anonymous of the account. It’s easy to spin up spam instances, and due to how federation works its hard to combat against it. I remember LW had an issue regarding that a bit ago with someone threatening to just keep changing domains to avoid blocking, which is indeed a problem for any of these style services. I agree at large scale, most sites are not going to want to have to put up with losing that level of control moderation side. It creates a lot of headaches and for most sites it’s just easier to enforce a policy that forces disclosing PII.
I absolutely love this.
Please. It is the most annoying part of trying to use some sites and I rather not give out my number to people who store important info in plain text files.
Yes. Don’t forget your phone number will be exposed to the public when the business gets hacked.
Not if. When.
Theres an LTT video where one of the boys intercept all Linus’ calls and texts, classic prank.
You mean the Veritasuim video with linus in it?
It is the same thing that happened with US Social Security Numbers, which were originally just tracking numbers for that one purpose that were coopted by capitalists and treated like something special.
I remember I was flipping through some of my mom’s old college stuff and there was a club that she was involved with and everyone listed their address and social security numbers. It was wild, no idea why they felt the need to collect socials. But this was a very long time ago.
My college ID used to be my social security number, so maybe it was something like that? Iirc that’s no longer allowed in the US.
Good lord.
Imagine giving an institution like that your money.
It’s not just “capitalists” (whatever that means), every government agency seems to want it, employers and banks are required to ask for it, etc. It’s more than just “some people misused it,” we actually wrote it into regulations.
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Are Internet security and Internet privacy incompatible goals?
They are if the security is tied to knowing that an account is a person.
To the same audience: quit selling my fucking phone number!
I ditched a phone number I had for 10+ years because it was leaked everywhere. Only a few short months after updating my number with the DMV and a handful of other government agencies I started receiving scam calls/messages again.
At some point we need to adopt some fucking privacy laws. This is absolutely bonkers—is no one else fed up??
Edit: I already know how to silence unknown callers. What I want is to not have the problem in the first place, ideally by 1) having companies not sell personal data to third parties and 2) being able to block spoofed (non-encrypted) caller ID.
Australia has a “do not call register”. It seems to mostly work, but telcos are having trouble with calls originating from outside the network with spoofed caller ID. We still get spam/scam calls from India among other places.
Even if they’re not calling you directly, they are still using your phone number to link you to things and create a shadow profile behind the scenes.
I have an app called Silence that lets me block calls from numbets not in my addreasbook. Highly recommended
https://github.com/x13a/Silence
Reminder: Dont blindly trust random internet sources!
I’m pretty sure a lot of scam calls use machines that call every possible phone number within an area code and see who answers. There is no way to avoid it.
this right here. I stopped getting scam calls years ago, I stopped answering and they just eventually stopped calling. If you don’t interact with the call (interact being ignore it or mute it NOT reject it) and it just goes to voicemail, they seem to eventually stop
If you’re job hunting, or work in specific fields this may not be a reasonable thing to do and that’s at least part of the problem.
This would deem troublesome yea, being said I firmly believe in separating work and home. I wouldn’t be willing to use a personal number for work related activities, at least not public related activities. Being said, I have no good solution for that, at least you are being paid for the scam call I guess.
Job hunting is what I meant. And you pretty much have to use your personal phone for that. I haven’t ever had a company phone. Doubt they’d give it to techs.
Lucky you. I’ve been letting calls from any number I don’t recognize go to voicemail for years and nothing ever seems to change.
I just block and report as spam any spam text messages I get and any calls that get marked as scam likely. It was terrible before the election because I live in a swing county in a swing state and I think everyone was just mass spamming every number in the area code, but since then I haven’t really gotten much, maybe one errant text every 2 or 3 weeks. Which is much better than it was last spring and summer when the amount started picking up for me.
Setup a whitelist, I think it’s native on iPhone and there are multiple Android apps. Only calls from your contact list will ring through. My voicemail is, “You’re getting this because you’re not on my contact list, send a text and I’ll get back to you.”
I set my phone to decline calls from unknown callers years ago.
These calls are already illegal. I used to report them to the FTC but I never heard anything back so I have no idea what happens, but I presume nothing. If I had the time to take them, and if they spoke English, I would record them with the Cube ACR app (which no longer works) and convince them to incriminate themselves. Ask their name, company, location, time/date, whether they ran my number through the DNC registry.
Oh everyone is fed up but we just elected a guy and government who is sure to make it all way way way worse.
He just helped put the nail in the coffin of the lie that crypto is for anything but scams, don’t worry, it’s gonna get real bad before it gets any better.
Did we? My government leader hasn’t changed nor have we had an election lately
There’s a subset of Americans who are rather like ostriches: heads so deeply buried in the sand that they forget anything exists outside their immediate surroundings. Reminding them that the rest of the world is out there rarely has any positive results, however.
If they could read they would be upset by that.
“Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam,” Mr Trump said. “I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.”
— Donald Trump
Of course, Trump Coin made just for him is fine. And any security who bribes him. Oh wait now none of them are securities; Gary Gensler was our last line of defense.
[Edit: got it backwards]
In South Africa, where I live, everyone is assigned an ID Number at Birth. You need an ID number, thumbprint scan AND proof of address to get issued a SIM card number due to a law introduced called RICA. It was meant to help fight crime. Worried that the government could listen in to calls or read their SMSs, the criminals just switched to WhatsApp, which also happened to become cheaper than SMSs and gained popularity in this time.
The cops never seemed to crack WhatsApp. The only drug busts that happen are when an open secret becomes laughably too open and when they harass every person arriving from South America at O.R. Tambo international airport just to catch the decoy mules carrying 12g of cocaine (total). Every dealer I ever organised with was over WhatsApp.
So now, woopsi, RICA stopped nothing and just became a liability. That treasure trove of fragile data made its way to scammers and spammers. A total net negative.
I’d encourage everyone else in other countries to apply major pushback to any government proposals in this direction.
Do people still believe that drug trade is ran by criminals?
I am pretty sure in every country, it is controlled either police or the spooks.
I am done pretending otherwise. Criminals are just useful idiots, the real thugs are the police and security apparatus
[citation needed]
there are MANY MANY examples don’t be a lazy pelican with your beak open. go look
The person who makes a claim has to back it up
stay ignorant and dangerous friend
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking
This is just one example;)
lists sourced from drivers licenses and motor vehicle registration records are literally sold by some states.
Yep, wish I’d known that a couple years ago.
Source?
wisconsin literally has an opt-out/opt-in (based on your current status) box on vehicle registration renewal forms, for one.
At some point we need to adopt some fucking privacy laws.
Yeah we absolutely had to ban TilTok because of privacy concerns but the idea of creating a law to protect our privacy is ridiculous beyond all reasoning. The stupidity of the United States government is absolute.
Agreed, but I’m not addressing TikTok specifically but rather policies similar to GDPR.
quit
sellingdemanding my fucking phone number!FTFY
I’m confused of how this keeps happening to people.
Like I use my phone on most sites that allow it and I’ve never had spam/scam calls really, but I’ve also explicitly unchecked the marketing boxes that appear on the signup so maybe that it.
The last instance that actually happened to me was with entering my university a few years ago for my BS degree. They 1000% sold my contact information as some part of the deans/honors list process. I reached out to them and stopped that so fast.
Don’t worry, here in Europe we are full of privacy laws but I still receive tents of spam calls per day. Usually from non UE countries faking the number with my country numbers.
Anything with a London 020 number is guaranteed to be a man with an Indian accent pretending to be from British Telecom.
At some point we need to adopt some fucking privacy laws. This is absolutely bonkers—is no one else fed up??
Look at you, trying to use the government to solve every day problems that face pretty much all of us.
Don’t you know we only focus on gridlock issues to distract us from real issues now?
I do, unfortunately.
