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This is the new norm... expect all services to require phone numbers due to spam and propaganda.
by burtonator 8y ago
This is the new norm... expect all services to require phone numbers due to spam and propaganda.
- Pfhreak 8y agoI have a really split opinion about this. On the one hand I've seen a lot of really hateful stuff lobbed around on sites like Twitter, and I suspect that linking accounts to phone numbers would dramatically reduce that. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want Twitter (et. al.) knowing my phone number.
- pknopf 8y agoI like it. I've grown suspicious with many accounts on Twitter. Maybe I can learn to trust more.
- zipperhead 8y agoI agree. I would rather pay them some fee. But they don't seem to want to monetize their service via user fees.
- komali2 8y agoOh my god, paid Twitter would be amazing. Well, then again, something awful was a paid forum iirc, and it was still a den of villainy.
- criddell 8y agoBut on Something Awful, it was a feature, not a problem.
- jordanwallwork 8y agoSeems like it would make a lot of sense for them to offer both options; either would discourage bots, and you'd give people the choice whether to go the free route or the privacy-conscious route
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hombre_fatal 8y agoSurely a phone number is no more identifying than a credit card payment in the age of KYC. And accepting a cryptocurrency would probably have little impact on all the lucrative scams that get spammed around Twitter.
- zokier 8y agoThis is bit of hypothetical, but does some sort of pki-like scheme exist that would allow me to hold a certificate (of sorts) from an authority that I could use to prove myself to an service, but also simultaneously would not leak any information about me to that service? Similarly service a and service b should not be able to link accounts behind my back. Sounds like a interesting crypto problem
- dymk 8y agoThere'd need to be some central authority (like you said) doing the certificate issuing that verifies that you are, indeed, a human, and that your a unique human that they haven't already given a certificate to. Chances are they'd want more than a phone number; probably a photo ID or something as well, else their value proposition isn't very strong. I'm not sure if that's better for privacy and safety than many services asking for just a phone number (which I can generate a semi-throwaway Google Voice number for).
- freeflight 8y agoI think that at this point FB has proven that people will be nasty regardless of how not-anonymous they are. As such I'm doubtful this will change anything about peoples behavior. It's also quite scary how nonchalant many people here are arguing for this to stop "propaganda" which these days seems to be as easily defined as "Anything that doesn't conform with a Western/US-centric narrative". Because I have yet to see one of these "propaganda ban waves" be reasoned with anything but "Russia/Iranian/Chinese propaganda" like that's the only kind of "propaganda" that exists [0]. As such I consider these "propaganda bans" just another exercise in propaganda [1]. [0] https://washingtonsblog.com/2014/07/pentagon-admits-spending-millions-study-manipulate-social-media-users.html https://washingtonsblog.com/2014/07/pentagon-admits-spending... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsehood_in_War-Time#Summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsehood_in_War-Time#Summary
- Kenji 8y ago*due to information harvesting and to prevent people from saying things the authorities don't want to be spread
- lima 8y agoSad but true. At the hosting company I work for, we had to start requiring phone numbers for cloud servers due to a massive wave of abuse. It's one of the few roadblocks that helps at least somewhat. Previously, we didn't even require a full name. A few idiots always ruin it for everyone.
- _jomo 8y agoYou seem to ignore that this constrains abusers as much as it does legitimate users. Collective punishment in order to mitigate abuse by a few is the wrong way to go.
- lima 8y agoWell, it works, and it's a minor annoyance at most for our legitimate customers. Abusers, on the other hand, have to burn a phone number on each account that gets locked.
- fogetti 8y agoI think you don't get it. It's not about annoyance. It's about the complete unreliability of any online service today. All and every customers show (and should rightfully show if they don't yet) complete distrust for a good reason. You are asking my phone number today and next day I will find it out in the open because of your and others' businesses don't give a .... when it comes to security. And don't tell me that's only a minority or the exception. Because that's just simply not true. 500px, Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Equifax among others all have been hacked at one point or have been exposed as unreliable and untrustworthy. It's just simply not a logical proposition to trust any online platform with private and/or sensitive data.
- lima 8y agoWe do care about security and hash the phone numbers after sending the verification SMS (we only need to determine whether a given phone number is associated with a locked account - a hash is good enough for that). Our problem is that criminals open hundreds of accounts with fake data and stolen credit card data, abuse our services until we get abuse complaints or detect it and lock them, then repeat that. This leads to legitimate customers suffering from bad IP reputation and is expensive to clean up. Requiring phone numbers and blacklisting known throwaway providers has been extremely effectively in preventing this, without generating complaints from our legitimate customers. We don't want to use browser fingerprinting or other intrusive mechanisms for detecting sybil registrations. What else do you suggest we do?
- miguelmota 8y agoTrue, requiring phone number are to prevent sybil attacks and are for accountability.
- Nextgrid 8y agoPhone numbers are extremely easy to obtain. This won't achieve anything in the long run.
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoCan I have 100 phone numbers for free? I don't believe it is so easy.
- Nextgrid 8y agoThe same way we have the robocall situation (thanks to shady telcos that turn a blind eye), the same way this system will be bypassed with similar telcos offering massive blocks of numbers at very cheap prices per unit (Twilio numbers seem expensive at small scale, but I guarantee you will get those prices down if you commit to getting like a thousand of those or so at once).
- dymk 8y agoWhat you're saying is, this has increased the cost of creating a Twitter spam account from practically zero cents to... what, 50 cents an number? A few dollars per number? That's a huge leap, and it sounds like requiring a phone number is a great way to increase the cost of spamming.
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoEspecially considering your average user already has a phone number and its basically free to verify. It only has a cost for spammers.
- 8y ago
- blhack 8y agoWhich is almost funny, because phone numbers have been so devalued by marketers.
- CamperBob2 8y agospam and propaganda When they tell you it's not about the money... it's about the money. When they tell you they want your phone number for anything other than making more money... it's about the money. Edit: -4, huh? Really? Have people forgotten what Facebook just did? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/you-gave-facebook-your-number-security-they-used-it-ads https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/you-gave-facebook-your...
- bilbo0s 8y ago??? Of course it's about the money. I'm not the CFO at Twitter or anything, but even I can see that spam and propaganda cost those guys a lot of money. The number of advertisers who stop paying Twitter because of spam will be orders of magnitude larger than the number of advertisers who stop using Twitter because of phone numbers.
- CamperBob2 8y agoI think you know what I mean.
- bilbo0s 8y agoMaybe I don't? Because that's what I thought you meant. I thought you meant Twitter is trying to put the squeeze on the spammers and propaganda ministers because they will lose advertisers if they can't? Did you mean something else?
- CamperBob2 8y agoDid you read the link to the EFF page I added to the post? Why should Twitter be considered any more trustworthy than Facebook when they ask me for something they don't need to know? They can avoid being victimized by spam and propaganda some other way... preferably some other way that I couldn't trivially defeat by giving them the number of a throwaway SIM card or a public phone booth.
- core-questions 8y agoI assume by "propaganda" what you mean is "deplatforming". Much easier to keep people who emit thoughtcrime off of your platform if they have to keep getting new mobile numbers each time they are banned.
- matthewmacleod 8y agoOr, you know… propaganda.
- darkpuma 8y agoWhen the NYT is cheer-leading for the next foreign war, will they get kicked off Twitter to? I sincerely doubt it. America's newspaper of record has a track record of being wrong during the onset of wars, parroting whatever Washington tells them is true, then eating crow much later and apologizing for. The most recent case was the aid truck fire in Venezuela, which it took them weeks to correct. You've also got WMDs in Iraq that never existed, and their parroting of the Nayirah testimony in 1990, only to admit two years later it was fraudulent.
- BroEconomics 8y agoYou have to understand when people say "propaganda" they mean "the wrong propaganda". If it is mainstream pushed propaganda, then it is acceptable. Sheesh, look at this russia probe that was pushed for 2+ years and it comes out it is all fake news. Look at the Iraq war and Weapons of Mass Destruction.
- pknopf 8y agoYou'd have to agree that the people affected most by this change will be bot networks (Russian IRA, etc). I doubt their goal is to keep "right wingers" they ban off there platform.
- chillwaves 8y agoDoes Twitter have a right to police their platform or not?
- OrgNet 8y agoPhone numbers are from the stone age... do you really think that they'll stick around?