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Comment by LegitShady | Hacker News Reader

twitter did the same thing to me, but worse.

they let me create an account and then locked it and wanted to know my phone number before they would unlock it. I can't even go delete it without giving them personal information.

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Google will not allow use of certain features (setting a thumbnail for a YouTube video) without giving your phone number. So it seems mor can play this game.

Yeah, I was contemplating to maybe start a Twitter account, but didn't because of that. They do this pretty much on every account creation after a couple of hours, I guess so that you'd have some time to get on the hook.

I'm kinda used to that and accepted that, apparently, I will never use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Google account because of that. Whatever, I don't care. What was really infuriating, though, is when PayPal asked me to enter my phone "to make my account even safer". Fuck them, but having problems with PayPal is quite a bit more annoying than being unable to use some social media bullshit.

I hear that. I have a Google account because I still use some Google services and it isn't tied to any social media nonsense unless you count YouTube.

For twitter I just favorite the few people I want to follow.

Surprisingly my instagram account has no personal information and haven't had any issues but I don't know why.

Google does a variant of that for one of my (rarely used) email accounts. On every day I attempt to log in, they throw a coin. Heads they let me in, tails they don't let me in unless I provide a phone number.

i got the same issue a few weeks ago, account is almost 2 years old yet they decided to lock it (my following count was set to 0 and i could not tweet anymore), with only way to unlock it being giving them my phone number

however, i managed to unlock it somehow, first i sent them a trouble ticket asking why i could not tweet anymore (which immediately got me an email that said my account was locked for "suspicious activity" and that i needed to confirm my identity with phone number), then i requested all the data they had on me through the profile options, waited 3 days for them to do the archive then when i logged back in to download it they would only ask for a recaptcha challenge to unlock my account

perhaps they consider bots unable to request gdpr data ?

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