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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

First thing I told my kids when they were old enough to start communicating with friends over the internet: don't use your real name, don't tell anyone your last name, don't tell anyone your address.

It's probably time to reiterate this...

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And then they go to school. School makes then use their full legal names to create an account and Google or Microsoft or Apple, store all their school activity under that. Then you explain to the school why it's not a good idea, but they say, they have to because, etc.

Most important: don't give your phone number to companies! It is used to link your activity across sites and apps.

You of course can't get an Apple ID, a Google Account, a Twitter username, a Discord account, et c without giving a phone number. There are several good reasons for that but the biggest one is for identification.

Discord does not require a phone number, just verifying an email address.

Try it from a VPN. It requires a phone number. If you do it from Tor, it requires a phone number and like 27 captchas.

I just discovered yesterday that while the Discord itself does not require it in all cases, certain servers with the highest restrictions can require that you have a phone number verified with Discord in order to post.

When companies like Discord or Google seem to let you create an account without a phone number, what that really means is that they already figured out your phone number based on your IP, HTTP ETAGs, or browser fingerprint.

Try it again using TorBrowser, or Tails on a VPN.

That was the benefit of early account creation with several of those companies. Spam email address is the only link. Twitter and Facebook keep harassing me for a phone number but nah, I’d rather not use it.

Of course it would be trivial to link to my IP, but I’m not going to make it easy for them.

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