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Comment by TimByte | Hacker News Reader

This feels like one of those "security" changes that also happens to conveniently eliminate a lot of privacy-preserving workflows

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Because it is. Total surveillance only works if the people are forced to wear the tracking collar. The next steps are tying it to CBDC, that require a phone number to access your wallet, and tying it to realid/passport to restrict travel.

2FA has become the wedge to break privacy into a million shards.

I prefer TOTP, but service providers seem to prefer their own apps or sms.

Phone numbers have become the unique identifier used to build profiles of people and the providers can still claim “security” when they change it to pursue that revenue stream.

Total surveillance only works if the people are forced to wear the tracking collar

Better to call it a noose. Because you can also be entirely "unpersoned" online if you don't comply.

There are services online dedicated to temporary account activation phone numbers to bypass Google's requirements, but most of them can only receive messages. Requiring the user to send an SMS seems like an excellent method to get rid of those services so that bots can no longer use them.

I don't really see the point of a privacy-preserving workflow when it comes to a Google account. It's not like they need to know your phone number to track you.

They might adapt and support sending sms (hopefully) in addition to receiving them. I guess all other services which send sms verification code will switch to ask the user to send the sms, like google.

>>don't really see the point of a privacy-preserving workflow when it comes to a Google account. It's not like they need to know your phone number to track you.

More information is always better.

Also, if you can get a Google account, it's like a magic ticket to use services that want to violate your privacy. So, if you can get an anonymous gmail account, then you can use it for all the enshittified sites, and reserve your actual email for sending and receiving messages to humans.

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