Inequality is exacerbated by the assumption that everyone has a mobile phone | Hacker News Reader

Inequality is exacerbated by the assumption that everyone has a mobile phone

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There are many more things like this:

- mailing addresses

- credit cards

- bank accounts

- transportation

- parents (if you're a minor)

- literacy

There's also a big, noticeable difference between organizations designed to serve the 90% of the population that generally has those things, and organizations designed to serve nearly 100%. The former can look like smooth modern startups like Airbnb or Venmo, surprisingly simple (for me) and low friction (for me). The latter can look like giant, impossible bureaucracies like the DMV or the IRS, who have trouble "modernizing" because all the old systems still have to be maintained for the people who depend on them.

Transportation is the big one. Transportation in American is so poorly designed that it basically forces an enormous (regressive) tax on everyone. Cars are an enormous cost for the average person, and are especially needed for service jobs of the poor. At the same time we pay huge amounts of money to maintain suburban infrastructure for the middle/upper class at the expense of public transit which could benefit everyone.

However, people in the suburbs pay for their infrastructure. Urban, rural, and bicycle transportation infrastructure is funded by suburban car drivers.

I live in California and ride a motorcycle, there's no way I wear out the road more than I pay for it and the infrastructure is shockingly bad, there are a few roads on my commute where I have to be really smart about my positioning because there are holes large enough to make me crash.

Fewer people can safely drive cars and we need more viable alternatives, but giving people the infrastructure they're paying for is important too.

Suburban drivers pay suburban property taxes which pay for the maintenance of suburban streets.

and suburban drivers pay gas taxes, vehicle registration fees, insurance fees, sales tax, etc. where does that go?

Highways

If only that were the case, often car users pay for pedestrian / bicyclist luxuries: https://bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/StateRevenueSourc...

What is this obsession with who pays for what? You all live in the same country and (broadly) pay the same taxes. Those taxes are used to fund all the things the country needs to exist.

There are also assumptions that everyone with a mobile phone will have the same phone number for a long time, never have their phone stolen or destroyed, could easily replace it and restore from a backup if it were, and pay their phone bill in a way that never results in cancellation (and thus forfeiting a phone number).

I know someone who works at a public library and regularly interacts with folks who've found hard times. From the stories I've heard, it's a fairly common situation for someone to want to reset their password, then be told by the site that they will receive a text message on a phone number "ending in ####". This is a challenge for those who had to get a new phone number since they signed up.

On this note, I have an old google account that wasn't used for a while.

Tried to access it recently, signing in with the correct password, and it whinged at me.

Offered to confirm that I'm "me" via SMS message to an old phone number (probably from the UK). No idea what that number would have been, as I'm not in the UK any more.

Alternatively, it offered to email a verification token to my email address. Did that, received token fine.

Still couldn't access the account. So now... no access to that account, and there's no avenue to follow up.

So, even with the correct password, and verified email, that account is now forever dead. :(

No wonder I fully agree with the "these tech giants are irresponsible morons" crowd. They've very much proven the case through their actions.

I really, really hate forced two-step authentication. It may be (somewhat) more secure but it doesn't work for everyone!

Ive been excluded from more and more shit lately just because I don't have a smart phone. I got a dumb phone for calls and SMS but even that is becoming inadequate. Even with mobile emulators many apps and signups don't actually work because there is no phone number registered to it and if I input my dumb phone number they just send me shit that I can't view to my dumb phone. Living in one of the poorest areas of the nation, I gotta save every penny I can, and a data plan that I would use once in a blue moon with garbage network service just isn't worth the cost. Not to mention the more expensive phone that will inevitably get destroyed on a job site while im climbing through rafters or jumping down in holes and shit. Google even discontinued their directions via SMS which should be a dirt cheap service to provide, so now im back to physical maps. Even the spammers now send me SMS messages I can't view.

Personally, I don't want to live in a world where I am forced to perpetually be networked up and tracked and spied on everywhere I go. Yeah you can circumvent a good bit of that if you really want to, but that is even more time and pain in the ass to do for every little thing, extensively researching every little app, and jail breaking all my devices so I have some sliver of control over it, while still paying out the ass to companies and practices I do not support. There are even government apps that require a smartphone app to access now with no PC equivalent.

This is a feature, not a bug!

Employers do not like the unemployed. This is a simple way of making it hard for the unemployed to apply. Whether it's good for society isn't their concern.

(Personally, I think we should be working towards hiding employment status from prospective employers. One thing I would like to see is dates should not be allowed on resumes. You list how long you worked there, not when. They can have the real data for a background check after making an offer of employment.)

mail.com?

There are plenty of free mail services that do not require a phone number. Yes, gmail and many others do, But a 30 second Google search will yield numerous options.

Feel like we just are looking for things to fit a narrative as opposed to real issues. One of those real issues being that the gig economy is almost completely off limits to those without a smart phone and data plan. And the people without those two things are some of the people that would most benefit from gig economy work.

To be fair, I didn't know about mail.com either, 100% I would have tried in this order:

Gmail Hotmail Yahoo ... Give up and go back to Gmail and put my phone number in and asked the lady to call me if anything came up and to switch it one day if she got a phone.

I don't think Gmail requires a phone number. I'm a digital nomad, only have a data plan (no voice) and don't know my number and I recently created another account without problems.

Maybe the phone number requirement is only for people in some countries.

And the more "AI" is involved, we'll see more people excluded in a variety of ways, the true negatives.

I think one solution is to make sure it's possible for everyone to have a mobile phone. They are so important on so many levels.

In this situation in particular - needing to get an SMS without a number - google voice is a good solution for that issue. I used it for a while when my US bank required getting a code via SMS to a US number. I know it's a chicken and egg thing getting it going - but if there's a way to get a person in this situation a gmail account, a lot more stuff opens up from having that resource.

A free cell phone for everyone should be added to Yang 2020's platform.

Obama already created a programs for mobile phones. I have a friend who got a free smart phone from the federal government. It was android and could load Venmo and other apps.

And he got a lot of flak for it too, "Obama phones" as a four letter word early in his administration.

With good reason - a lot of people were hurting in the recession and watching the government pay for smart phones for lazy good-for-nothings must have been incredibly frustrating. If the government stopped favoring the unwilling to work over the down-on-their-luck, we may have a less toxic political culture.

If you keep posting flamebait to HN we will ban you.

The whole point of distributing money instead of goods is that the goods people want change over time, and large bureaucracies are slow to react to those changes. 30 years from now, people won’t want cell phones. They’ll want whatever new technology we use to communicate.

Free mobile phones for the indigent (with data) are already available in CA.

no, you can buy a phone with the $1000/month dividend

think this is an instance of the general problem where everyone wants to outsource and/or automate identity verification because it’s a cost center and they aren’t liable for failure. In some cases it’s simply impossible to validate your identity face to face with a competent human. This problem seems to be worst when a revenue model depends on scaling and automation.

A few examples:

--Your free email got hijacked, and the attacker changed all the password reset stuff to lock you out. If you followed instructions, your real answers were easily discover-able. Instead of letting you show your state ID to a human, Freemail uses your phone number as 2FA, so instead of paying for labor, it’s the phone company's problem. Also, you have basically lost all your photos and correspondence ever.

--It’s where all your other password resets for other sites are sent, so instead of paying a human, it’s the email company’s problem.

--Credit card companies want spam instant lines of credit through the mail without paying a human to check your ID before lending, so it’s the credit bureau’s problem.

--You can’t answer the credit bureau’s identity questions, but there’s no human available, so it’s your problem.

--The credit bureau leaks the data used to validate everyone’s identity, but they’re not (substantially?) liable so it’s the public’s problem.

In a lot of these corner cases, there is no incentive for anyone to internalize the cost of fixing things when their own automation fails. What’s especially frustrating to me is the case where private persons are liable to prove their own innocence when a company is negligent in lending or billing. This seems like a cooperation problem that the market is no danger of fixing any time soon.

s/mobile phone/<x>/g with x being any of email, reliable ISP, physical address, bank account, at various points in our history.

Interestingly enough, around here it seems like many (most even) homeless people do have a mobile phone, save for those that actively reject societal norms.

Even some prisoners have cell phones.

The world is hard for people with any aspect of their life more than one standard deviation from the cultural norm.

Also sticking with the current cultural norm, we only acknowledge the above to be a problem when we can find "inequality" to be a contributing factor. Everyone else can just be expected to conform unless their "why" also makes for good headlines.

What I also don't understand is the assumption that people don't share phone numbers or have multiple of them.

If they want to restrict a service to a physical person, then at least in Germany there are identification services.

Simplifying creating an account on behalf of someone else could help, it seems. Then the author could likely have helped out the woman directly, leveraging the trust accrued by her own account.

But if the author had her own mobile phone with her, it seems she could have used this plus existing account creation mechanisms anyway?

In the UK you can sign up for a Gmail account without any other contact info - just an unverified name and date of birth. Is this different elsewhere?

If you try to register multiple Gmail accounts from the same location (such as a public library), at some point Gmail will start to ask you for a phone number verification.

This is something I saw a few years ago in France (before GDPR), there is no reason it has changed.

I suspect it is to avoid fraudulent accounts while still letting a few mails being registered without verification for first time users in a location.

What was the last time you signed up for a Gmail account? At least in The Netherlands they've been requiring mobile phone numbers for years. Hell, I have a dummy account (Maps locks a lot of functions behind login) and I can't log in to it anymore since Google wants me to register my phone number 'for security and validation purposes'

The cheapest way to solve this would probably just be to buy everyone a phone...

Though that wouldn't solve the privacy problem, since there are many privacy hostile countries in where you're required to verify your identity to buy a sim card.

Kingsman style.

how about having simless phones in libraries and people get to put their sim cards in? it's much cheaper or even free to get a simcard in some cases

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