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Let's not forget the notable case of Twitter "accidentally" using your provided phone number for advertising purposes [0], and to this day still banning you aft

by 0x_rs 6y ago

Let's not forget the notable case of Twitter "accidentally" using your provided phone number for advertising purposes [0], and to this day still banning you after registration if you refuse to give it. [0]. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally-uses-your-2fa-number-targeted-advertising https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally...

finiteseries 6y ago
I’ve been using Twitter to follow some people who don’t have blogs etc since last May, and haven’t been banned yet. Lots of likes, no RTs or posts though.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Facebook did this as well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sneak 6y ago
Twitter also had staff who leaked Twitter account PII from the Twitter DB to spies from the Saudi government, who have a habit of killing journalists from time to time. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saudi-arabia-infiltrated-twitter https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud... Collecting this data is an accident (or murder?) waiting to happen.
johndough 6y ago
Twitter is especially silly in that regard. The info page on why my account was banned implied that one of my tweets violated the community guidelines - although I never tweeted anything. Even more frustratingly, there is a form to appeal a ban. After filling out that form, I got a confirmation mail stating that Twitter will "respond as soon as possible", or in other words, never. I do not understand why they bothered to implement all that hijinks to waste my time. Simply disallowing signups without phone number would have been much simpler and less dishonest.
officeplant 6y ago
Haven't given them my number on any of my twitter accounts. Where does this banning rumor come from?
- livre 6y ago
  I had that experience, maybe they are more forgiving to IPs coming from certain countries or locations. IPs from my country tend to be treated as suspicious (not as bad as Tor but bad enough to be an annoyance) so as soon as I registered ok Twitter I got a notice about "suspicious activity" and about having to validate a phone number to be able to use the account. At that time (2015 I think, I don't have the account anymore) you could get around that by contacting support, explaining that you don't have a phone number and waiting a few days for them to manually unlock the account. Edit: this happens with Google and Yandex as well, requiring phone number to sign up (Yandex can unlock you if you contact support). Microsoft isn't as bad and can work with just a secondary email instead of a phone number. Also the whole country is banned from downloading the Lynx web browser at https://lynx.invisible-island.net/ https://lynx.invisible-island.net/
  - fuzxi 6y ago
    >as soon as I registered ok Twitter I got a notice about "suspicious activity" and about having to validate a phone number to be able to use the account. At that time (2015 I think, I don't have the account anymore) you could get around that by contacting support, explaining that you don't have a phone number and waiting a few days for them to manually unlock the account. Same thing happened to me last year in the US. The kicker was that they automatically opt you in to product update, daily digest, etc. emails. But those emails don't have a 1-click unsubscribe - the unsubscribe link takes you to your account settings, which you can't access when your account is disabled. So you can't unsubscribe from the emails or delete the account. You can either add a phone number to stop the spam, or search around to find the page where you can submit a ticket (because there's not a support link on the disabled account page) and hope someone gets to it eventually. They never even replied to my ticket, they just silently unlocked the account after a week or two.

by 0x_rs 6y ago

finiteseries 6y ago

I’ve been using Twitter to follow some people who don’t have blogs etc since last May, and haven’t been banned yet. Lots of likes, no RTs or posts though.

Nextgrid 6y ago

Facebook did this as well.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

sneak 6y ago

Twitter also had staff who leaked Twitter account PII from the Twitter DB to spies from the Saudi government, who have a habit of killing journalists from time to time. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saudi-arabia-infiltrated-twitter https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud... Collecting this data is an accident (or murder?) waiting to happen.

johndough 6y ago

Twitter is especially silly in that regard. The info page on why my account was banned implied that one of my tweets violated the community guidelines - although I never tweeted anything. Even more frustratingly, there is a form to appeal a ban. After filling out that form, I got a confirmation mail stating that Twitter will "respond as soon as possible", or in other words, never. I do not understand why they bothered to implement all that hijinks to waste my time. Simply disallowing signups without phone number would have been much simpler and less dishonest.

officeplant 6y ago

Haven't given them my number on any of my twitter accounts. Where does this banning rumor come from?

livre 6y ago
I had that experience, maybe they are more forgiving to IPs coming from certain countries or locations. IPs from my country tend to be treated as suspicious (not as bad as Tor but bad enough to be an annoyance) so as soon as I registered ok Twitter I got a notice about "suspicious activity" and about having to validate a phone number to be able to use the account. At that time (2015 I think, I don't have the account anymore) you could get around that by contacting support, explaining that you don't have a phone number and waiting a few days for them to manually unlock the account. Edit: this happens with Google and Yandex as well, requiring phone number to sign up (Yandex can unlock you if you contact support). Microsoft isn't as bad and can work with just a secondary email instead of a phone number. Also the whole country is banned from downloading the Lynx web browser at https://lynx.invisible-island.net/ https://lynx.invisible-island.net/
- fuzxi 6y ago
  >as soon as I registered ok Twitter I got a notice about "suspicious activity" and about having to validate a phone number to be able to use the account. At that time (2015 I think, I don't have the account anymore) you could get around that by contacting support, explaining that you don't have a phone number and waiting a few days for them to manually unlock the account. Same thing happened to me last year in the US. The kicker was that they automatically opt you in to product update, daily digest, etc. emails. But those emails don't have a 1-click unsubscribe - the unsubscribe link takes you to your account settings, which you can't access when your account is disabled. So you can't unsubscribe from the emails or delete the account. You can either add a phone number to stop the spam, or search around to find the page where you can submit a ticket (because there's not a support link on the disabled account page) and hope someone gets to it eventually. They never even replied to my ticket, they just silently unlocked the account after a week or two.