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Comment by jzl | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty clear from some simple googling that he ended up somehow activating a feature called "Facebook Texts" (the key giveaway -- that replying to the texts posted to his wall):

https://www.facebook.com/help/130694300342171?helpref=faq_co...

I believe that he didn't set this up intentionally and it may very well be a bug that caused him to be signed up, but as bad as Facebook is I'll eat my shoe if they signed up every single person who gave a 2FA phone number to this service.

Not to detract from the fact that Facebook's nagging is indeed a huge problem.

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> I'll eat my shoe if they signed up every single person who gave a 2FA phone number to this service.

Facebook doesn't have to sign up every 2FA person. It can pick a few hundred or thousand and see what happens. If engagement increases, then more 2FA people are brought on board.

If this isn't widespread, it may not be the user's fault. It may just be the camel's nose under the tent.

The evil of unrestrained A/B testing.

I've heard engagement increases if you give the impression a family member is going through a personal crisis, perhaps facebook ought to look into the technique, seems excellent for the metrics.

No. Look at the following tweet. He explicitly says that he hasn’t enabled this and posted a screenshot of his settings:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Gabriel__Lewis/status/96312181416...

Update: Matthew Green just experienced the same thing, in the midst of tweeting about the security implications of abusing 2FA phone numbers this way:

https://mobile.twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/9637666614...

It's a default that's checked when you add your phone number.

I'm not happy that it's a default, but when I added my phone number I had no trouble noticing it and disabling it.

My wife started getting these after she hadn't logged in for a few weeks. We thought it was them getting nervous about a lost user. Since she hadn't logged in, it definitely wasn't her accidentally checking a "please text me spam" button.

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