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Comment by declan_roberts | Hacker News Reader

Services like Apple’s “hide my email” are becoming more and more important. Not only does it prevent apps and websites crossing you across the web, it prevents website hacks from identifying you.

Expect websites and apps to strong arm your phone number in the future as a result.

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I use Fastmail for that and without noticing, I'm to 32 "fake" addresses. Got banned by EA for buying and playing a game with an account on such an address.

Hah, that's dystopian. Taking precautions and being punished for it.

One man’s precautions are another man’s dataminig opportunity loss …

For EA it is less about datamining and more about flagging behavior that matches that of a cheater evading a ban. Cheaters reduce the fun, and therefore value, of a game.

I only own one game and it's offline, so there's that

If your concern is datamining, then you should be far more concerned about the billing info (which can't be faked) than the email.

FYI you can often set the billing address info to whatever you want for a lot of purchases, there's no mechanism to validate it.

>there's no mechanism to validate it.

Why would you spread falsehoods like that?

https://stripe.com/resources/more/what-is-address-verificati...

"Businesses in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom use AVS" I don't live in any of these countries. Even so it's more cost for business to use AVS, most won't. The likes of my mobile phone credit or Steam or Spotify or cloud services don't use any sort of address validation

with the state of most data mining programs out there, moving addresses will destroy any ability to link you.

Right but changing your billing address/credit card number is still way much harder than creating a new gmail/outlook account.

You got banned while using a Fastmail address? That's hard.

I used masked emails for almost everything and thankfully haven’t run into any issues like this

Many apps and services now demand a phone number, sometimes lying about suspicious activity or security problems to get you to cough it up. Others wait until you've been using the service to spring it on you so they have more leverage to squeeze it out of you.

Many of these services will also block signing up with throwaway email providers, of course Apple's service would require them to block to many "legit" users so it remains a good choice. The ones taking your phone number usually block land lines and voip providers, some even block prepaid mobile plans!

Meanwhile they lose your PI and shrug their shoulders or blame the users, but if you try to protect yourself from their garbage security the decide you must be a bad actor for practicing compartmentalization to limit the blast radius of their inevitable screw ups. It isn't like there is punishment for them screwing up so there's no reason for them to not take everything they can get.

Also highly recommend Relay by Mozilla. Coupled with their password manager, everything is so smooth

We also need something for phone numbers, since these also get leaked all the time and then you get weird Whatsapp calls. Reporting has no use, the numbers in Whatsapp never get blocked.

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