"Email is hardly better than SMS" is an absurd claim. As has been written SMS is not secure, easily hijacked, and potentially transmitted in the clear. By cont

"Email is hardly better than SMS" is an absurd claim. As has been written SMS is not secure, easily hijacked, and potentially transmitted in the clear. By contrast email can be made arbitrarily secure nowadays via e.g. DANE/STS-MTA, and it's entirely up to an email provider how secure mailbox access is. Saying that "email is hardly better than SMS" when the former can be secured via DNSSEC/DANE and where the mailbox can only be accessed by me over an SSH tunnel is truly laughable. In fact since sites which demand phone numbers seem to have some completely baseless idea that the phone number is somehow more "secure" than email, often adding a phone number will enable phone number-based recovery methods which therefore actually reduce account security.