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Comment by lskopwol | Hacker News Reader

Actually, fb still requires the phone number, if you try to open up a few accounts in succession. You can't use throwaway numbers or Google Voice numbers either. So it's actually pretty hard these days to open a Fb (Or Hotmail or Gmail) account without a legit (cellphone) number.

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throwaway numbers can mean many things even a 5 dollar sim. some services even let you change phone numbers on a whim cell numbers are mobile in more than one way and very easy.

Many places I've been won't let you buy a SIM without showing id.

Yeah. I think while not nation-state-secure, you can still improve your PII exposure to Facebook/Twitter/Google et al by buying/activating a SIM/phone-number and only using it one time for the purpose of creating an account.

I don't _think_ Twitter or Facebook are doing backroom deals with every prepaid sim vendor to be able to tie that phone number back the the identity used to register the sim card.

I wouldn't suggest you use this to register your Dream Market vendor account, but I doubt you'll end up with targeted advertising based on your other real-world web/app behaviour based just on the ID provided for a single-use burner SIM...

Yeah, what's the problem here? Presumably Facebook won't get the data on the legal owner of the number.

> Many places I've been won't let you buy a SIM without showing id.

You don't need to show any ID in Europe to buy non-contract phone number. You can go into most stores and get free or pay 1-5 euro for a phone number.

And then you typically need to do some kind of identity verification to activate it.

Possible that's typical, but it's certainly not universal

In Austria, Belgium & Germany you do, in Croatia & The Netherlands you don’t

Germany passed an anti-terror law a few years ago, getting a phone number requires the same level of verification as opening a bank account.

Even before that prepaid phones have been a strawman argument, actually maintaining a 2nd number in the long run is quite a bit of work since it usually expires if you don't use it enough.

Not in the UK you cant.

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