As far as possible I never give away my phone number, to any online service. Facebook, Google and LinkedIn also makes it hard for you to sign up without one I r

As far as possible I never give away my phone number, to any online service. Facebook, Google and LinkedIn also makes it hard for you to sign up without one I recall. The 2FA argument is week imho. It's all disguised datamining is my guess - similar to how Google properly uses captchas to simultaneously improve their ML algorithms (ever stopped to think about what those captchas contains? Crosswalks, cars, parking signs, crosswalk lights etc.). If you're an American citizen you can use Abine's Blur subscription to mask your phone number (and more), unfortunately it doesn't work outside of US yet.