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>If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened. To keep your i
by some_random 4y ago
>If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened. To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.
I'm so sick of this kind of victim blaming, you're forced to add a phone number to use twitter.
- kordlessagain 4y agoThe company entity requires blaming others. It can't blame itself, otherwise stakeholder value is affected. If you want to blame anyone, blame the environment that allows these types of actions by companies, or simply stop using them. BTW, no Twitter account is "ours". If it was, we could download everything (friends and all) and move it somewhere else. Twitter needs to take ownership of all data on their platform - user accounts included. Trying to separate them into different entities is ridiculous.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoThese are cogent points and I completely agree not admitting fault seems the playbook for publicly traded companies. It’s unfolding in real-time with Tyler Technologies and we’ll have to see how it plays out. Intelligent institutional investors are poring money into a company that is responsible for leaking millions of intended to be confidential CRIMINAL RECORDS and is trying to blame JudyRecords for finding their mistake. Again it goes to show we don’t really own anything that turns digital, and no safeguards are guaranteed. The only recourse is legal action, which is, IMHO going to bankrupt Tyler r force numerous spin offs to pay the class action results from the CA State Bar…and potentially hundreds more.[0] The environment is one of no consequences when hiding behind a corporate banner, for most intents and purposes. Choose who you work for wisely. [0] www.JudyRecords.com
- vladtheimpala 4y ago> It can't blame itself, otherwise stakeholder value is affected. One would think dishonestly blaming others for the consequences of their own conduct would also affect stakeholder value.
- JacobThreeThree 4y agoYeah, it's shocking they would say this when they do require phone numbers in many instances.
- anjel 4y agoMany unexplained instances. (Twitter will claim a prior but unspecified TOS violation but thats a dodge, rather than a justification)
- londons_explore 4y agoNo mention of that fact that 'use another phone number' is quite an expensive thing to do in countries where a phone number has an annual fee of hundreds of dollars. Suddenly 'use twitter securely' has gone from 'free' to 'hundreds of dollars a year'. Perhaps they should announce this as a price change instead?
- colechristensen 4y ago>countries where a phone number has an annual fee of hundreds of dollars. Is this a thing? I've never heard of it. Where?
- londons_explore 4y agoIt's true in the USA if you stick to the big providers... Ring up t-mobile and say 'I'd like a line with 0 minutes and 0 GB of data, just to receive verification texts for Twitter' and they'll probably quote you $200 a year or so...
- colechristensen 4y ago$120 before tax for T-mobile for 1000 minutes, 1 GB/mo.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fuckstick 4y agoWhy the arbitrary limitation to the “big providers” - you can get a basic Tello plan with SIM for $5/month prepaid - and they’re a T-mobile MVNO so it’s a T-Mobile number.
- jrockway 4y agoTracphone is the company you want for this sort of thing. A SIM costs $0.99 (requires unlocked phone of course) and you add $15 to the account to get 500 texts. (I think you can do this with cash at a place like Walmart.) It is expensive if you need to keep the plan around, but Twitter doesn't seem to regularly send SMSes to the phone number, so you probably don't need to pay beyond the first month.
- strulovich 4y agoIt might have some PR speak sprinkled, but it’s genuinely good advice, put more bluntly: “We can screw up, if it’s important enough for you to stay anonymous you should get a separate phone number and email” That is a good tip with every company. If you want better security, have less trust in the services you’re using. This goes to what victim blaming is. Yes. It would be great if the victim lived in a better world. But sometimes extra caution could help them now without waiting for the entire world to change.
- sneak 4y agoIn Germany and other countries you have to show government ID to get a GSM number. Phone numbers are like bank accounts: strongly linked to official name and identity. This advice is bullshit.
- croes 4y agoBut you can abandon a number after you registered on Twitter. Doesn't help against agencies but against scrappers
- vlovich123 4y agoDoesn't that make account takeovers easy?
- croes 4y agoMy social media accounts are all disposable, so it doesn't really matter to me.
- vlovich123 4y agoSure. You understand how that's not necessarily the case for many other people, right?
- lynndotpy 4y agoMy very recent experience contradicts this. I removed my number and was immediately locked out until I added it back.
- traceroute66 4y ago> I'm so sick of this kind of victim blaming, you're forced to add a phone number to use twitter. I had some old accounts that did not require a phone number. At least until I wanted to enable TOTP 2FA. At which point the numnuts at Twitter would not just let me "just" enable TOTP, I was forced to provide a phone number (which, to add insult to injury, for at long time they refused to accept because they would only send messages to a limited number of carriers).
- gojomo 4y agoAnd then Twitter misused authentication phone numbers for marketing: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/05/twitter-pay-150-million-penalty-allegedly-breaking-its-privacy-promises-again https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/05/twitter-p... And also used a sketchy service provider who was selling personal info about Twitter users to governments: https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/09/twitter-2fa-text-privacy/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/09/twitter-2fa-text-privacy/ Twitter has been habitually careless with user info & user privacy.
- MoebiusStrip 4y agoTwitter decides when to hit you with the demand for a phone number. Try sh!itposting for a couple weeks. That usually does the trick. This may be Twitter's best anti-bot measure, although state-sponsored troll farms will likely be able to afford all the SIM cards they want and need.
- 627467 4y agoAgreed but, in what jurisdiction does Twitter require phone numbers?
- RL_Quine 4y agoAll of them. You don't need to provide one on sign up, but your account will be soft banned typically in a couple of hours until you provide one. So it's a requirement that they aren't forthcoming about.
- lostlogin 4y agoI have an account that doesn’t have one and works fine. I wonder why they don’t always require it.
- kevinh 4y agoA year or so ago, I created an account and followed ten or so people (no tweets at that time). When I went to log in the next day, it wouldn't let me log in until I attached a phone number. As I understand it, that was a relatively common occurrence.
- gojomo 4y agoAnd, this is just one of many examples of a deep, deep dishonesty at the core of Twitter Inc's operations: Pretending they're not requiring something when in practice, a giant proportion of their userbase faces it. Pretending anything changes when you click 'See This Less Often' on some annoying feature. Constantly undoing a user's preference for 'Latest' over algorithmic 'Home'. Claiming they don't "soft-ban" but absolutely, verifiably, hiding some users' content from others who have explicitly followed them. Implying there's some effective "appeal" process for arbitrary & often clearly erroneous moderations decisions – when instead it's just designed for coercing compliance, including the simualted "voluntary" deletion of tweets, under penalty of losing your account indefinitely. Slurring & hiding replies with no hint of offense as "potentially offensive". Describing tweets as "unavailable" when (often) all you have to do is click to see it - wasting users time. Offering "Show additional replies" even when there's nothing more to show – again wasting users' time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CommanderData 4y agoTwitter would actively block one time numbers. This seems like a lie. I tried to use onoff numbers with Twitter on multiple occasions but failed to receive anything. They are being very misleading here.
- pigtailgirl 4y ago-- not only do they block one time numbers - google voice numbers - etc - they claim you CAN sign up with just an email account - let you - and then 30 minutes later automatically lock your account and tell you the only way to verify it is with a number - I was setting up an account a week ago for a client and I eventually gave up - because I was sick of being lied to by their UI --
- RonMarken 4y agoSome people claim this is the situation with the new Twitter onion-service. Sad.
- rex_lupi 4y agoTip: If you email(anonymously ofc) twitter support that you do not have a phone number to receive the OTP for verification during account creation, they generally approve your request.
- mhh__ 4y agoMy twitter account does not have a phone number attached
- skybrian 4y agoThey seem to be recommending that you use an unlisted phone number. That seems like a good idea.
- gojomo 4y agoTo some privacy threats, essentially no numbers are "unlisted".
- devmunchies 4y ago> you're forced to add a phone number to use twitter. is that true for the desktop web client?
- madars 4y agoYes. They will let you sign up with just an email but after few minutes of activity your account will be locked and they will demand phone number verification.
- gpm 4y agoIt was for me. When I created an account, they blocked it 30 seconds later (before I had done literally anything) and would only unblock it upon me adding a phone number. Google suggested that this was common practice by them at the time.
- tnzk 4y ago> a publicly known phone number or email address I don't get the definition of "publicly" here. Does it mean something on Internet, or include numbers I tell people in-person? If the former, not so many people put their number online I suppose...
- spullara 4y agoYou can remove your phone number after creating the account.
- rozap 4y agoI really doubt it's a hard delete.
- pauldenton 4y agoAnd right after you do your account will be locked
- spullara 4y agoI have an account with no email address and no phone number so not sure what you mean.
- bena 4y agoI mean, originally twitter was an SMS based service. It was made for phones.
- aendruk 4y agoYep, Twitter got my phone number because at the time 40404 was the only mobile interface, and half the point of the service.
- yodsanklai 4y ago> If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account If you operate a pseudonymous account anywhere, you should always assume there's a slight possibility that one day your identity is known. I think it's not far stretched to think that in the future, malevolent governments will have access to whatever things we may have posted and use it against us.
- iszomer 4y agoI have yet to add my phone number to my account. My guess is that it isn't applicable for legacy accounts circa 2008.
- gojomo 4y agoIt can be triggered for opaque reasons. My account dates to February 2007. I was prompted for a phone number a few years and given no other options to recover the account. Burner & VOIP numbers that work for many other things, including SMS verifications, were rejected. I suspect the reason was some rapid changes in my IP address in a short period, together with a lot of Twitter tabs open – whose constant background requests often seem to trigger, for me, some sort of Twitter-side connection-slowing. (Their own shoddy, high-weight design makes my normal usage pattern look like a DoS attack to them.) So your style of usage, moreso than your account age, is likely for being spared their arbitrary phone-number inquisition.
- echelon 4y agoFucking vile victim blaming. Twitter should not be requiring phone numbers, especially when they don't care enough to protect them. This is why we should get back to protocols for communication instead of platforms.
- franklampard 4y ago> add a phone number They do this to combat spammers, don’t they?