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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

Using a public VPN is almost guaranteed to flag your logins as suspicious at all of the big tech companies.

If anyone wants to see how intent big tech is on tying your profiles back to personally identifiable information, connect to a VPN and try to create new accounts on various services. It's basically impossible without a non-VOIP phone number. If you manage to get an email address, big sites like Facebook and Twitter will instantly lock your account and require SMS verification.

Big tech discriminates against anyone that doesn't have enough money to own a phone.

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I recently tried to start up some new accounts across all of big tech, while keeping my true identity private. I was making up names etc. I wanted to try out the services under a fresh new name and see what it was like (Facebook feeds etc).

Every one of them required a phone number and had all kinds of algos and databases in place to thwart anonymity. If all of your demographic information didn't match the country your IP address was in the experience turned into a brick wall.

I did this a few years ago when establishing an onion (new accounts created and accessed only over VPN+TOR) identity for the dark web and didn't have a problem.

If I needed to hide my identity and communicate with people as a non-techie journalist or dissident I would not know how to proceed at this point.

This is not being done to fight terrorism. The real reason is to ensure that every user is a real person that can be sold.

When some fat cat spend thrift advertising executive complains about possible sock puppets numbering in the millions on their platform they just kick back and explain thier byzantine system of identity verification.

Isn't that just a necessary measure to stop bots?

Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on these systems at all.

My general understanding is that Google wants to prevent account takeovers, as it happens far too often. They flag accounts for various heuristics, even if you know the login (as it could be someone that stole your credentials). This normally should just trigger 2FA for that login. If that doesn't work, you likely need to go through the account recovery flow:

https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery

Google won’t allow account creation from a low reputation IP without a phone number AFAIK, so a person that can’t afford a phone or Internet that’s trying to set up an email account in a library or Internet cafe will, for all intents and purposes, be denied service for being poor.

I hope they appoint the fruit ninja as head of the DoJ so he can slice Google into a thousand pieces :-)

Whenever I'm connected to my VPN (I use Private Internet Access), Google will force me to pass a captcha test every time I do a search

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