3 ms·
Phone number verification is used to verify the user's registration intent, so not really.
by supriyo-biswas 3y ago
Phone number verification is used to verify the user's registration intent, so not really.
- explaininjs 3y agoA Flow: > Service A => User: Please Enter Your Phone Number and Email > Service A => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us > Clearinghouse => User (SMS): Please respond with the Email you used at signup to confirm you want an account with Service A Later... > Service B => User: Please Enter Your phone number and Email > Service B => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us > Clearinghouse => User (Email): Please verify you want an account with Service B Not saying it's great (providing email twice is annoying), but it's something.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rezonant 3y agoThis does not reduce the overall cost, it just shifts it to the clearinghouse. Who pays the clearinghouse so that they can cover their own exorbitant SMS costs?
- explaininjs 3y agoYou miss the crux of it: the second time onward the clearing houses uses email to authenticate the previously-SMS-verified account.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoThe clearinghouse may not have the user’s most recent email address, which is common amongst non-tech people. My mom and aunts have lost many email addresses this way and forcing them to use an older email would cause many issues.
- explaininjs 3y agoThe app has to ask for email/phone to begin with (see step 1), if the email doesn't match then phone would be used as fallback, or potentially as a "Didn't Receive Code?" gesture.
- Aachen 3y ago"Sign in with $Clearinghouse" could bring you to a page that prompts whether you want to share a user ID or the phone number, as required, with that service. The clearing house verifies you only once, or once a year, instead of every time. If the clearing house were to be a nonprofit, perhaps even set up by Signal themselves to spread costs with similar services, that has to be cheaper. It also gives users confidence that only a randomized user ID was shared, so it won't be used for cross-service correlation and tracking, if the service didn't actually need your phone number but only some identifier.