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Comment by chimen | Hacker News Reader

Even attempting to stay private gets you banned on most services.

Ran into this today logging into PayPal (the password-must-be-8-20-characters payment service) for the first time in a long time to buy a band t-shirt. After jumping through two different types of CAPTCHAs, now they require you share your phone number to log in. I contacted support via Twitter saying they have my email if they want to verify a login because I'm not comfortable with SIM jacking nor how data-mining is cross-referencing phone numbers (I can set up U2F or TOTP after initial verification). They said call them... which is still giving out your phone. I tried to use a Google Voice number, but I got an error about these types of numbers being blocked. To get a non-useless level of support, you must log in so it's either give up your data or no service for you. You shouldn't be required to give out your number to most online services.

I just feel bad for the indie band I couldn't support.

This is my issue with authy(the 2fa provider that twitch and others use). TOTP needs 2 things to function, a shared secret and a synced clock. No phone number. No email. No account. No personal information. All you need is a secure connection to send a 16-32 bytes of data and to both have synced with an NTP server recently, yet there's no way to get the shared secret from authy without giving out personal information.

find thier [indie band] email and touch heads on how to mail them a fiver

Could you call them with Calling Line Identification Restriction? (I. e. caller ID blocking) There is usually a prefix you can dial to suppress your ID. But the exact prefix depends on your location, I think.

Caller ID blocking only affects the consumer level feature, not Automatic Number Identification which was historically available with PBX lines and toll free numbers, but might be available to more people these days.

I believe such restrictions are defeated/not available for toll free lines.

Stuff like paypal exist so that powerful people can shut you out of the economy if you challenge their power. They complain about money laundering while the CIA is the biggest money launderer in the world and no one goes to jail when Deutsche bank launders Jeffery Epstein's payments. But operating a Bitcoin mixer is a federal offense. They are scared.

Just imagine lock downs augmented with geo fenced official national wallets with cash no longer accepted anywhere.

This is one of the use cases for cryptocurrency. Decentralization means there is no company in the middle that can force you to give up your data.

In this case, Bandcamp, which I generally like, doesn't yet support crypto. I think it's also a lot to ask a small band to pick anything other than PayPal for international payment.

I didn't mean as applied to this band specifically, just that in general cryptocurrency solves this class of problem. There are a lot of detractors who don't feel it has value, but this is an easy place we can make things better with crypto.

Setting up a Monero wallet or whatever shouldn't be that hard.

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