alt Hacker NewsThis seems to focus on "verifying" accounts using SMS, but I have never been asked by any service to do this. When does this happen?
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Twitter settled a lawsuit about this, there was a period where you could sign up without one but your account would be pretty immediately flagged for 'bot like activity' and asked for a phone number to confirm your humanity. They promised to use this for verification purposes only but of course used it for targeted marketing purposes.
> The Complaint alleged that, from May 2013 through September 2019, Twitter encouraged its users to disclose their phone numbers and email addresses for security purposes, such as enabling two-factor authentication and establishing a method for recovering lost passwords. More than 140 million users provided their information to Twitter.
https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/blogs/enforceme...
I think this just means you're from a respected country or IP block (or email or phone carrier), and so your existence online doesn't provoke suspicion? :)
I know some people dislike being reminded of this, but I share it because I'm personally always grateful to notice a new edge of it in my own experience: it's perhaps a dimension of privilege (which is neither good nor bad, just something to know that one [might] have, often in some subtle or hidden dimensions and not in others)
It's common on services that are attractive targets for spammers or bots.
Creating a new GMail account will require a phone number now, except maybe through a few avenues which are rapidly being closed.
Signing up for popular social media services often requires a phone number.
Signing up for free trials on a lot of platforms requires a phone number.
Everyone knows it's not a perfect measure, but it substantially slows down bot and spammer signups. Even spammers who use these verification services may get an account created, but internally it will be assigned a higher index of suspicion and be more likely to be flagged. When services operate at Facebook or Google scale, they can start to notice when 30 accounts have used the same SMS verification phone number through one of these services in the past N days.