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Comment by eimrine | Hacker News Reader

It is a shame I can not rely on e-mail anymore as a second factor for totally any website, because what is following next is a phone number as a required second factor.

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This month in Australia the second largest Telco went down for a day.

Then the next day I read a report on how they’d just dished out someone’s existing mobile number to a new customer!

The same number now registered twice on the network.

Mobile numbers as auth are a disaster.

A convenient disaster however.

Mobile numbers are the obvious choice for large tech companies. They provide a pretty good user identifier for tracking and advertising purposes. And they allow outsourcing the hard parts of verifying a user to some one else. It isn't much wonder why they went this route and usually fall back to it even if you've setup something else.

Yeah. The worst thing to happen is if you get a new phone with a new number. Oh my. I was locked out of so many accounts, including my bank account. It's not easy to reset a phone number you no longer have access to.

> It's not easy to reset a phone number you no longer have access to.

Just call the police.

Phones became wallets except we don't control them.

With digital id, a dystopian nightmare.

What's so dystopian about it? Is this just the weird Anglo-Saxon cultural thing of ID cards being way worse than passports and state IDs for incomprehensible reasons?

I don't think IDs are dystopian but having so much of our identity and information inside expensive closed-source surveillance devices is somewhat dystopian. The happy path works great but the failure modes are a pain in the ass and it's part of why people lose their shit over lost/broken/stolen phones.

Because of the app wants to “un-person” you all they have to do, intentionally or unintentionally is set a flag in a database and now you cease to have an identity.

Because increasingly, we don't own or control our phones. Carriers can push any software they like to it, or can be compelled to. Operating system vendors can add, remove or edit features that can restrict our freedoms or for pernicious purposes. App developers have had free reign over tracking our use, despite changes to the rules from big app stores. Simply viewing an image or opening an SMS can trigger a remote code execution, giving our device to an attacker who never knew us, saw us, or targetted us.

Everything in your wallet is yours, it doesn't change unless you make the change. No-one can decide what the contents do or what they are, how they watch you or report your behaviour. The contents of a wallet are free.

>Because increasingly, we don't own or control our phones. Carriers can push any software they like to it, or can be compelled to. Operating system vendors can add, remove or edit features that can restrict our freedoms or for pernicious purposes. App developers have had free reign over tracking our use, despite changes to the rules from big app stores. Simply viewing an image or opening an SMS can trigger a remote code execution, giving our device to an attacker who never knew us, saw us, or targetted us.

None of that seems to have anything to do with a digital ID.

My understanding of this thread is that it's about phones being our digital IDs, except we don't control them.

If you get thrown into the pool with a wallet in your pocket, no big deal. With a cellphone, it’s a $current_iphone_price loss.

Even if phones were $0 people would be upset because it's all the passwords, accounts, login credentials, second factor, photos (are they backed up!?), call history, etc. Too much is tied up in these things.

iPhones are IP68 water resistant.

They're too expensive and stuff on them too important to test that feature. Apple marketing claims they are, so... Anyway I think most of the cases when iphone falls into the water is when it sinks in it forever.

Only before the first battery change.

Dystopia cancelled. /s

Ip68 is a mere 1.5 meters! It’s still a dystopia until we get iso6425.

Maybe you're right, but Apple says the iPhone 15 Pro is safe in up to 6 meters of water for up to 30 minutes

Wallet with plastic cards inside is pretty much guaranteed to survive falling on a concrete floor.

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