17 ms·
On top of it, it's not just a matter of creating an account because they get blocked within two minutes until you also give them your phone number, despite the
by wildpeaks 5y ago
On top of it, it's not just a matter of creating an account because they get blocked within two minutes until you also give them your phone number, despite the registration pretends it's not required (because once you signed up, it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront).
- sova 5y agoYou can petition them (via email) to not require your phone number and if your emails are persuasive enough they will activate the account without a phone number. But yeah, that is an extra step, and usually takes 2-3 emails that say something like "this account is vital to our business"
- miohtama 5y agoHere is a research how much phone number verification decreases account fraud a.k.a. spam bots http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/43134.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
- ben-gy 5y agoThat is genuinely a very interesting paper - thanks for sharing
- ecf 5y agoOf course, in order to help out the unfortunate website operators, people should willingly give up pii that the same companies have shown they don’t give a damn about protecting. /s
- queuebert 5y ago"For your protection." The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st century.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoThey always add that incorrect “y”.
- ElFitz 5y agoAlong with "For your own safety".
- whoooooo123 5y ago"safety" is a term that's been abused since at least 1793: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Public_Safety https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Public_Safety
- ElFitz 5y agoThe translation is inaccurate. It means safety in the same way as the salvation of the soul for Christians, but in a non-religious way, and applied to all of society. Yes, they were both quite grandiose in their wordings and full of themselves. Safety, as it is commonly used, would better be translated, in French, as "sûreté". "Salut" would be a much, much stronger word. Although I do see your point.
- whoooooo123 5y agoWell damn, that ruins one of my favourite points. But I'm still not quite sure what the French word "salut" means. Is there not a simple one-word English translation? What exactly is the remit implied by the name Comité de salut public?
- kubanczyk 5y ago"Salut" in this context translates as "salvation" in the sense of "preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss".
- 5y ago
- Spivak 5y agoI mean what do you want them to actually do instead? Like seriously I’ve implemented at a company I worked for and it’s the least invasive thing to actually rate limit people. Alternatives included: - pay a small fee but that requires a credit card - send us government documents which is worse - mine crypto for a while but it doesn’t stop people who are actually motivated - send a selfie and then do some face matching, also worse. Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive?
- est31 5y agoPersonally I'm a fan of the fee idea. You can quickly outstrip the yearly revenue per user with even a small fee, and the fee payment could e.g. happen via PayPal which doesn't require credit cards, to give one example. The issue with fees though is that you might need a billable address for tax purposes which renders this entire exercise pointless.
- mcny 5y ago> The issue with fees though is that you might need a billable address for tax purposes. Maybe there is room for some simple innovation here. Is it possible to do “coarse” address for tax purposes? After all I imagine they only care about which tax jurisdiction such as county / parish or something like that?
- Someone 5y agoI don’t understand that in this context. Let’s say you pay a fee for being able to view tweets without logging in. How will they know it’s you who’s trying to view a tweet if you don’t effectively log in?
- tomc1985 5y agoMetaFilter's been doing this for decades and it seems to be working well for them
- throw6746 5y ago>I mean what do you want them to actually do instead? Nothing. Hire more moderators maybe. it also looks dishonest to frame it this way when twitter asks these pii for "spam protection" and yet still can't ban obvious Fiverr-like spam accounts > Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive? Nothing, somehow plenty of websites do fine without even asking for email, including this one. It seems what you really want to say is "What can we ask from you for it not to cost us anything?".
- vxNsr 5y agoSo maybe don’t require an account to view tweets, or don’t let me tweet until I provide phone number but still let me view… lots of options
- est31 5y agoBut then they don't get data on which tweets you viewed.
- arsome 5y agoThey can't set a cookie? Associate my phone with my desktop by IP address correlation on home ISPs? C'mon, they oughta be more capable than that.
- est31 5y agoCookies don't track you nearly as well. What happens if you delete a cookie? Fingerprinting isn't a universal solution either as iDevices all look extremely similar to each other. As to IP addresses, they only work if you connect from your home WiFi. Not every phone has that set up. Often they use carrier grade NAT so you only have a few IPs to work with. Last, customers of their data love being able to search/correlate by phone number, not by some pseudonymous identifier that might not be present in some other dataset. I think this crackdown might in fact be a reaction to attempts by institutions like Apple to ensure better privacy. If fingerprinting isn't giving them the data, they ask for it directly at the threat of restricting access.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago>What happens if you delete a cookie? I imagine the data of 99.9% people they mostly care about are the ones who dont know what cookies are, let alone how to delete them or otherwise mask/misdirect various internet trackers.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Jnr 5y ago~10 years ago I made about 10k Twitter accounts just for fun. I never used them. They still exist, no one deleted them. A while ago I lost the script and password for them. Back then you could bypass captchas and other checks by changing Tor endpoint (some endpoints required captchas, some didn’t). Made a script that did just that. It also worked for Facebook and I still receive facebook spam for those accounts daily. I have no problem with asking for a phone number during registration, it complicates automated account registration and makes it quite expensive. But I dislike the idea of hiding content behind login page, internet should not be a walled garden.
- meltedcapacitor 5y agoHow is that relevant to read-only access, which is what is reportedly being newly blocked?
- dredmorbius 5y agoIf reading content generates spam, You Have A Bigger Problem.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoTheir fraud problems don't justify anything though. Nobody outside Twitter cares about Twitter's problems. Just because they have a problem doesn't mean they should get to solve it, especially if it involves personal information disclosure which can get people killed.
- finiteseries 5y agoI created an account in May 2021 without a phone number to follow some people without blogs etc, and it’s still working with just a disposable email. They’ve added sign in/up with Google & Apple recently though.
- jchw 5y agoYou can get away with that on a residential IP sometimes, but don’t count on it. Log in from the wrong location or a VPN or do certain patterns of behavior and it drops you.
- finiteseries 5y agoI exclusively use it via VPN, with a ProtonMail address from the web (so many login notifications) while like, commenting, and subscribing on politically controversial content and soccer. Three, almost four months in and zilch. It’ll be a good test case anyways.
- thebooktocome 5y agoThey flagged my phone number-less account after four months, probably because I replied to a high traffic thread.
- ZanyProgrammer 5y agoI think the key to using a phone number less account is to use it as much as you can in read only mode.
- genewitch 5y agoFixed wireless ISP in the US and I hit a captcha on every site from time to time when logging in (and sometimes just trying to read-only) - and I'm effectively blocked from anonymous sites. I can "lock in" an apparent IP address, i.e. ssh to some box with no-ops; but that's either per-connection or still NAT enough that I get flagged. att aggregates all such connections at F5 routers in large cities, mine is in Dallas, for both of my fixed wireless connections.
- 0x_rs 5y agoWhich is not reassuring considering their past abuse of phone numbers provided for allegedly only security reasons. [0] [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...
- sneak 5y agoIt's worse: Twitter staff sold private user PII to the Saudi government (the one that assassinates journalists): https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saudi-arabia-infiltrated-twitter https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud...
- eurasiantiger 5y agoRemind me again, why did we leave IRC?
- Barrin92 5y agoplenty of people never left IRC, but Twitter right now is probably a thousand times larger than IRC was at its peak. IRC is a niche community for nerds, not a platform with mainstream appeal. The same is even true for more user friendly, modern services like Mastodon. 99% of users just don't value the things you value in these services.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoBecause IRC hasn't meaningfully improved in about 30 years. There have been attempts to make it friendlier with things like IRCCloud, but then the beards just scoff at the idea of a $5/month bouncer-as-a-service and go right back to wondering why the protocol is dying.
- JadeNB 5y ago> Because IRC hasn't meaningfully improved in about 30 years. I'd way rather have something that doesn't improve for 30 years than something that actively gets worse at a rapid clip.
- 9034725985 5y agoPersonally, I don’t mind giving them my phone number because my number is already public information. It sucks though that I can’t get tweets by text. This was the original use case of twitter. I understand SMS is not secure enough to publish tweets but why can we no longer get texts when someone tweets?
- amatecha 5y agoI'm pretty sure you can still get SMS notifications by turning it on in your Settings[0] and then also clicking on the "Notifications" button on the specific profile for which you want to receive notifications. I haven't used it in ages but all the settings appear to be there still :) [0] https://twitter.com/settings/sms_notifications https://twitter.com/settings/sms_notifications
- Kye 5y agoYou can remove the number after you've used the account for a while and not get locked, but they shouldn't require it in the first place.
- echelon 5y agoIt's probably permanently held in their databases. Some services use immutable data models that "append deletes". (GDPR made those types of systems fun to deal with.) Might be bad for activists, whistleblowers, et al.
- antifa 5y agoThe point is to never give it to them.
- myhf 5y agoAnd yet that account will still get suggestions to follow people who have that phone number in their address book. Thinking face emoji
- mschuster91 5y agoI'm not sure I'll blame Twitter for (effectively) requiring phone numbers - they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one side, people rightfully complain about trolls, harassers, spam, CSAM, misinformation campaigns and propaganda on online services. And on the other side, people will also rightfully complain about data harvesting, and an ever growing lack of anonymity on the Internet. At the moment, phone numbers are the closest thing we have to at least have some cost associated with spamming and a legal pointer to get hold of criminal-level abusers. Using government IDs such as the German Personalausweis (which can communicate with a website using NFC and a special app) would outright kill anonymity, using middle men to do the same (or video/postal identification) like for banks, porn and gambling sites costs money and is not much better in terms of anonymity.
- yholio 5y agoYou can request phone numbers when creating a certain number of tweets, or trying to reply to a well known account, or if upvoting a comment that is controversial or reported as spam. It's a lazy solution that pushes spam control costs onto the users.
- sgustard 5y agoBut all I want to do is read the tweets? I'm not contributing to spam if I don't even have an account.
- CydeWeys 5y agoI want to be able to read the New York Times without a subscription too, yet here we are. Corporations don't have to give all their services to us for free. They can charge, require free registration, whatever.
- maram 5y ago>> it's easier to trick people into giving up yet more information than asking for it upfront What I found interesting is that “translate tweet” button doesn’t appear unless you are signed in. Why cannot I read news from all over the world unless I’m signed in? Why do users have to sign in to read translated tweets in real time?
- sbagel 5y agounless they've changed their policy on this you can email support and say you don't have a phone number and they'll re-active your account, has worked for me in the past.
- nichch 5y agoI can confirm this as recently as June 2021
- gunapologist99 5y agocouldn't you just call them instead?
- LeoPanthera 5y agoWhile this works, I still hate the lie that they have suspended your account for "suspicious activity". If you're going to require a phone number to read tweets, don't lie about it, just be up front about it.
- peakaboo 5y agoAt some point there will only be people who don't care at all about their privacy that use twitter, Facebook, Instagram... All these American services in "social" media.
- ZWoz 5y agoI have noticed that most those services (twitter, Skype and so on) block login without giving phone number...until few months later they automatically unblock. I simply check out in every week, are they removed block or not. Once I was stupid and gave phone number one of those kind services, that was bad idea. Account went into some weird state after giving code received from SMS. So my personal experience: wait, never give phone number.
- mikro2nd 5y agoThat's odd. I've never given Twitter a phone no. (Granted my account predates their phone no. fetish.) Still use Twitter daily without any issue. Perhaps it's because I'm still logged in and not trying to re-login?
- djrogers 5y ago> Granted my account predates their phone no. fetish I doubt that - twitter started as an SMS service…
- mikro2nd 5y agoDoubt all you like - that's how it is.
- sli 5y agoTwitter doesn't seem to care much about established accounts, but every attempt I've made to make a new account under a new name gets suspended.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- axpy906 5y agoIdeally, there should be an option to not give it. It’s a security risk for those with MFA elsewhere.
- cm2187 5y agoSame experience, and why I do not use a twitter account. Plus the last thing in the world I would do is to let some woke SV company associate the political opinions I follow with a real identity, not in the current environment.
- the_pwner224 5y agoUnrelated, but does anyone know if Facebook does this? They seem to allow signing up with just an email address, but I haven't tried going through with it and seeing if they'll eventually require a phone number.
- auscompgeek 5y agoFacebook do require a phone number to access their API (or otherwise manage a Facebook App).
- jvanderbot 5y agoYou can remove your phone number easily under account settings. This trickery is still a very effective way to get phone information for masses of people, but on the individual level, it's possible to avoid.
- RedComet 5y agoYes, but once you've added it, they have it, even if you can't see it in your settings.
- jvanderbot 5y agoYou're assuming they keep it, but is there evidence of that? Regardless, it's a good assumption. I'll actually ask twitter support right now!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Razengan 5y agoAnd this is why things like Sign In With Apple are a godsend* for users, which predatory devs rail against on HN. * Even though the bait-and-switch can be done there too, but at least you didn’t have to give up your email to the scummy service.
- dredmorbius 5y agoFWIW: HN are receptive to member feedback about improvements to Hacker News itself. This includes both encouraging sites, content, and/or users, and suggestions as to unwelcomed behaviour. email hn@ycombinator.com