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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

I always feel I'm in a twilight zone with whatsapp. Am I the only person who doesn't want or need to give the app all of my contacts, or even register with just phone number? Phone number is such an intensely and irrevocably identifiable token and so hard to change, that using it for pervasive messaging seems insane to me :-/

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I hate these apps that absolutely need a phone number. I couldn't pay my bill on my cellphone one month, lost the number and now I can't access either my WhatsApp or Telegram accounts.

I've had my phone stolen while traveling, and I can't say how much I despise any system that uses a phone number for authentication.

Go figure, you can't get a SIM card sent to you from the US to Europe, meaning that you potentially lose:

* Access to messenger apps and chat history

* Access to your bank account (with a special nod to Citi)

* Access to your email account if it uses "2FA" with a phone (looking at you, Google)

* etc

Given that my bank cards and laptop were stolen along with the phone, I've had a Very Fun Time™ dealing with all these systems.

You can port your phone number to a voip provider if you will be out of the country for a while. Use a sip phone app, and the "transport layer" sim that you happen to use will have nothing to do with the phone number that is intermingled with your identity.

This is way too much hassle even for me as a techie.

And something tells me short-code SMS receipt (which is what banks use for 2FA) is not going to work well anyway.

If you don't need it, you don't need it. But for the record:

a) Porting your number takes about as much effort as moving between mobile phone providers

b) Setting up a sip app on your phone is trivial (server, username, password) - I'm generally a fan of Acrobits Softphone

c) My voip provider has an sms <> email gateway, so my bank (and other sms based) mfa lands in my gmail inbox

FWIW, Telegram actually handles this pretty well. You just have to have loged in on another device while you still have your phone. You can use that other device to deauth your lost or deactivated phone and auth new logins on other devices.

Sadly I didn't use Telegram for 6 months and when I went to use it I found out they had a 6 month timeout on your login and it basically wipes your stored credentials after 6 months :(

I'm sure you're not the only one, but in a tiny, tiny minority. Using the phone number as the identifier was pretty much the main selling point of Whats App.

I feel the same way but this wariness is amplified by the fact that I don’t trust Meta. Still, I’d be more inclined to sign up to Whatsapp than create a Facebook account; a few real-world friends have said they’d prefer to use Whatsapp over SMS – particularly for sending photos.

Oh, if you're willing to follow its demands, whatsapp is a super smooth experience. All my family uses it.

But the funnel is brutal. Try signing up from anything but a phone, or try not giving it full permissions, etc etc - and you'll have a miserable time. It's a vicious vicious sweet and alluring Black Mirror episode.

>>Am I the only person who doesn't want or need to give the app all of my contacts

No, you are not the only one. I don't understand how sharing contacts with any app is legal under GDPR without getting consent from all contacts

The whole point of contacts is contact information you want to share with apps.

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