And yet they actually demanded I give them mine, and have repeatedly, recently demanded a confirmation.
Phone numbers are one of the worst 2fas.
Data right now is typically bought and sold with an expectation that most of it is crap. it's faster to buy and process 5000 dirty items that probably has a few good leads buried within it than to find leads manually / naturally or broadcast random advertising. (I left the industry in 2020 and my NDA expired in 2021)
Data quality is typically assessed at the "Does this data field have a value for this line item" level. That means data vendors are financially incentivized to make shit up about you as much as they can get away with. think about it for a second, these companies are selling themselves as the source of truth. the actual accuracy does not matter, and the better you are then the less data your customers buy. the data goes stale faster than the accuracy of the data becomes relevant
Did you like a post about a fresh baked baguette that had #french as one of the 100 tags associated with it? congrats, you're french now. it's not exactly this ridiculous, but you get my point
there are some verification focused services - like they take a list of emails and check if they are valid email addresses. Some use fine print to say they are only validating whether or not it is of valid email address FORMATTING, and make no claim about whether or not the email will bounce. verifying if the email address actually belongs to the person it claims to is not part of the deal.
it's nearly an impossible task, because you have no actual source of truth to verify it against. So data vendor A and B give you different results for the same search - now what? you have to manually research and see whos "right" or "more recent".
even if it looks like good data, it might be stale. For example, company size, revenue, C level email addresses, etc all change over time.
so if a customer wants cleaner data - you basically charge them to pump the dataset through Mechanical Turks or upwork or something to have people try to verify things manually. Datasets can be large though and this gets expensive, so it tends to be better to just buy the crap data for cheaper and figure it out yourself
I have a conspiracy theory that these verification services are behind a lot of the phone spam today. they are just checking if your phone number is valid, they dont actually care if you answer.
Exactly this. But they can get away with basically anything. Worst case for them is they show you a premium ad you aren’t interested in. Best case is they guess correctly
Three-dot "More" > Settings and Privacy > Privacy and Safety > Content You See > Interests
"These are some of the interests matched to you based on your profile, activity, and the Topics you follow. These are used to personalize your experience across Twitter, including the ads you see. You can adjust your interests if something doesn’t look right. Any changes you make may take a little while to go into effect."
They recently (early this year) onboarded a few million kids with the Minecraft account migration, and a lot of those new accounts will have flagged as "suspicious activity" and demanded a mobile number to verify who they are..
I had to look up whether this was actually official communication, since it sounds like a kafkaesque fever dream, but yes it's real.
Tech CO's have been doing everything in their power to get your number and email, used it for advertising, and deliberately disabled non-regular phone numbers. And now suddenly you're being gaslit that it's your fault for complying with their demands.
The cream of the cake is the vague "if your phone number is publicly known" stuff. Well yeah, every single phone number is publicly known because it's enumerable. Even if it weren't, almost everyone's number is harvested and resold by gray-market data brokers. Sounds like they want to muddy the waters and make it sound like a targeted vulnerability when in reality it is indiscriminate.
(If you want it, mine's another recommendation for Authy.)
Google Auth is just TOTP, yet Authy is not capable of using it somehow? I'm so confused lol. I've used plenty of TOTP apps with Google.
At least I couldn't find other way to enable TOTP i.e. first SMS.