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Comment by switch007 | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop pretending that the faux concern for the security of our accounts by tech giants was anything other than an excuse to harvest our phone numbers?

Twitter for example let's you sign up without a number but it then suddenly detects "suspicious activity" and demands your number. Many other sites enforce it or heavily nag you in the name of security.

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Same with collecting birth dates. It’s just a convenient way to target ads.

I’ve been trying to get Google to stop giving out my birthday for years when I had to enter it for wallet or something. I get birthdays on my calendar from people I emailed once and never knew, or wanted to know their birthday.

Similarly, my contacts have gotten peoples phone numbers changed based on changes made in various subsystems that overwrote the number that I manually entered.

I standardized on giving 1/1/1970 [1] as the date of birth except where I feel my actual birthdate is required.

With online ancestry sites (birth place, mother's maiden name, first name of paternal grandfather), Facebook and Classmates.com (high school mascot, pet's name) and so on it feels like anything "real" could be compromised. Or give somebody enough ammunition to pretend to be me.

I use fake answers but it means carefully logging the answers so I don't forget them.

1. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26205/why-does-unix...

I like 2/29 as some systems are dumb enough to only bug me once every four years instead of once a year.

Recommended. Always use different fake answers to everything, be sure to log them in wherever you keep your passwords managed though.

Funny how my best friend from high school is named yiKooPh2 (not a real value of course).

It's called "bait and switch".

Similar dick-ish behaviour on Steam. I didn't have a 'profile to comment' on the comment section of a game (Saboteur 2 - Avenging Angel)(I cannot remember the room that gives you the 'god mode')

I went on to create a 'profile to comment'. When I proceeded to write the actual comment I was informed that 'I am not allowed to comment on this game' (I had already logged in with my Steam account. Those *** just wanted the extra info only to tell me what they knew (that I would not be allowed to comment anyway). I deleted said 'profile to comment' but now those *** will keep that info forever.

This is not related to SMS (I thought we established that even with someone with $50k -or less- to burn can read the SMS messages of their neighbours)(https://www.intercept.ws/catalog/interceptors/)

Exactly! Same with Google, FB. Disk space is almost free, let who ever sign up.

As a devil's advocate, how about the notion that requiring mobile numbers mitigates, if only a little, automated spam?

In my country you can easily buy a few thousand SIM cards for a cent or two each. I've seen them in classified ads, they're not even hiding.

Same in mine, spammers buy blocks of numbers (for example all numbers from XXXXX100 to XXXXX999) and use them to avoid being blocked by people who block individual phone numbers (with the default phone app). Fortunately I found Yet Another Call Blocker on F-Droid and I can block by pattern with it (XXXXX*) but most less technical people won't be doing that.

You don't even need that, at least in America. Phone spoofing is terrifyingly easy.

Do you not have to pay a network provider in order to use it to make calls and send messages? How does this work?

Personally I don't really mind receiving too much info (asid from DoDS attach of course). Bayesian running locally is pretty good at filtering out spam any way. Stop pretend to corporate nannying us.

The problem with that is, if you are going to automate spam, you can afford a burner. Or heck, just pay the $16 or so and hijack someone else's number.

I don't think that's true. For one, the sign up of the accounts itself is often automated and in the hundreds, because bot accounts are squashed all the time. You'd spend thousands on burners.

Spam is mostly prevalent because it's cheap and easy to throw millions of requests at the wall and see what sticks. If it did cost really any money at all it wouldn't be remotely worth it.

Spammers don't just use one account to spam.

There are free services where you can see a number to get that 'activation code'. Plenty of such services out there.. (a quick search in DDG and this is the top result)

https://mytempsms.com/receive-sms-online/country.html

When twitter suspended my account after creation I tried to use these type of services. Unfortunately every number I tried resulted in an error.

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