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Here 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
by miohtama 5y ago
Here 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".
- ElFitz 5y agoExactly. "Committee of Public Salvation". Sounds weird. So, in this case, considering they considered themselves the defenders of the greatest ideology of all time and the (worthy) people, and were at war with both foreign countries and some of their own people, I’d say it'd mean something like: "Committee in charge of delivering the country, the Republic (the idea of Republic itself; not just it’s French incarnation) and freedom / democracy (even though they weren’t quite democratic) from utter ruin and certain doom" But that’s quite a mouthful.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agouh, 'to protect the children' would like to have a word.
- bookofjoe 5y agoWait — you mean "Sanitized for your protection" on glasses at cheap motels isn't true?
- meowster 5y agoI think it stopped being true at the word, "Sanitized".
- kabdib 5y ago"For purposes of National Security . . .", a close second.
- MikeDelta 5y agoNext to: 'no need to worry about privacy if you've got nothing to hide'.
- npteljes 5y agoRight there with "for us to deliver better user experience"
- dredmorbius 5y agoTwitter's users are its advertisers. Tiwtter's product is you.
- queuebert 5y agoAn important finesse.
- npteljes 5y agoWe criticize free services all the time for this, but I think that paying users are monetized all the same. Using American examples, the DMV sells data, internet providers are selling user data, credit card companies are selling user data... so it's not like any other companies don't monetize their users in other ways.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThis is true. Paid services also tend to parasitise their legitimate users and maximise revenues. A key difference is that in the Twitter case, there's no monetary penalty which can be imposed by the host class (that is, the unpaied content contributors). Much of the "harvest as much data as possible" element is also driven by fundamental power and monopolistic differences.
- povik 5y agoAlso at top of the list: “We care about your privacy” (and not that we are required by law to give you these options that follow)
- JadeNB 5y ago> The most abused and dishonest phrase of the 21st century. The T&C equivalent of "your call is very important to us"?
- meowster 5y agoRight before "We are experiencing higher than usual call volumes."
- 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.