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Anthropic doesn't allow me to use my phone number across my personal and business logins. I simply can't use Claude where I need it, even if I'm willing to pay.
by glimshe 1y ago
Anthropic doesn't allow me to use my phone number across my personal and business logins. I simply can't use Claude where I need it, even if I'm willing to pay. I don't understand why they add so much friction when everyone else just allows me to do work.
- raldi 1y agoWhen was the last time you tried?
- electric_muse 1y agoThis whole “real phone number is your access code to every service” trend is really frustrating. I had the same experience recently with: - Ticketmaster - Docusign - Vercel Probably a handful more I forgot. I believe the main reason is because it prevents fraud. But I see a deeper motive that phone numbers are more friction to change and therefore our “real” numbers become hard-to-change identity codes that can easily be used to pull tons of info about you. You give them that number and they immediately can look up your name, addresses, age, and tons of other mined info that was connected to you. Probably credit score, household income, etc. Phone numbers have tons of “metadata” you provide without really knowing it. Like how the Exif data in a photo may reveal a lot about your location and device.
- derekdahmer 1y agoAs someone who implemented phone verification at a company I worked for, it’s 100% for preventing spam signups intending to abuse free tiers. API companies can get huge volumes of fake signups from “multiplexers” who get around free tier limits by spreading their requests across multiple accounts.
- AlexandrB 1y agoThis makes sense for free tiers of products, but if you provide CC info for a paid tier, you shouldn't also have to provide a phone number. One or the other.
- moduspol 1y agoI think people can use stolen / one-time use / prepaid / limited purchase size credit cards fairly easily, too. And you might not find out until after they've racked up a non-trivial amount of costs.
- derekdahmer 1y agoTheoretically yes but a few issues: - Account creation usually happens before plan selection & payment. Most users start at free, then add a CC later either during on-boarding or after finishing their trial. - Virtual credit cards are very easy to create. You can signup with credit card with a very low limit and just use the free tier tokens.
- anonym29 1y agoMandatory phone number registration does not and never has prevented fraud. Plenty of free VOIP services exist, including SMS reception. Even when the free service providers are manually blocklisted, one-time validations can be defeated with private numbers on real networks / providers for under a dollar per validation, and repeated ongoing validations can be performed with rented private numbers on real networks / providers for under ten dollars per month. The rent-an-SMS services that enable this are accessible through a web interface that allows connections from tor, vpns, etc - there is no guarantee that the telecom provider's location records of the IMEI tied to that phone number is anywhere close to the end user's real geographic location, so this isn't even helpful for law enforcement purposes where they can subpoena telecom provider records. This "phone number required" practice exists for one primary reason: for businesses to track non-fraudulent users, data mine their non-fraudulent users, and monetize the correlated personal information of non-fraudulent users without true informed consent (almost nobody reads ToS's, but many would object to these invasive practices if given a dialogue box that let them accept or decline the privacy infringements but still allowed the user to use the business' service either way). Sometimes, they are also used for a secondary reason: to allow the business to cheap out on developer costs by cutting corners on proper, secure MFA validation. No need to implement modern, secure passkeys or RFC-compliant TOTP MFA, FIDO2, U2F when you can just put your users in harm's way by pretending that SMS is a secure channel, rather than easily compromised by even common criminals with SS7 attacks, which are not relegated to nation-state actors like they once were.
- slipnslider 1y ago>never has prevented fraud. Interesting, I've heard otherwise but it was anecdotes. Do you have any data on that? > to track non-fraudulent users You listed a large number of ways to fake the phone number which is why you believe it doesn't prevent fraud. What is to stop a non-fraudulent user from doing the same thing to prevent the tracking by the company?
- anonym29 1y ago>Do you have any data on that? The original stated intention of the practice was that "it" [mandatory phone number registration] "prevents fraud" (though this stance was being critiqued by the person who raised it, not defended). I'll concede that it probably has stymied some of the most trivial, incompetent fraud attempts made, and possibly reduced a negligible amount of actual fraud, but the idea that it can "prevent" fraud (implying true deterministic blocking, rather than delaying or frustrating) is refutable by the very reasonable assumption that there is almost certainly no company that implements mandatory phone number registration that has or will experience ZERO losses to fraud. That said, in fairness, this is an unfalsifiable and unverifiable claim, as to my knowledge, there is nothing resembling a public directory of fraud losses experienced by businesses, and there is no incentive for businesses to admit to fraud losses publicly (they may have tax incentives to report it to the IRS, legal incentives to report it to law enforcement, and publicly traded companies may have regulatory incentives to at least indirectly acknowledge operating losses incurred due to fraud in financial reporting), but that doesn't make the claim itself unreasonable or improbable. >What is to stop a non-fraudulent user from doing the same thing to prevent the tracking by the company? The argument isn't that mandatory phone registration unavoidably forces privacy infringement upon all users, just that it does infringe upon the privacy of some (I'd suggest a vast majority) of users in practice.
- catlover76 1y ago[dead]
- giancarlostoro 1y agoSounds like you want a Google Voice Number or similar service, but now you're spending money for someone else's awful software, and in some cases, some places will flag your number if its google voice and outright refuse to let you in.
- rs186 1y ago...Like Claude. They don't allow you to use Google voice numbers for verification.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI want a "burner" number, but I'm not sure what the best option is, do I buy a crappy phone at Walmart and use that number? What's the bare bottom of the barrel cost for a phone with no mobile data, only SMS?
- typpilol 1y agoTracFone with minutes at Walmart If you load it with 10 dollars in minutes, it'll be good forever. But I'm not sure what TracFone has for an inactive policy
- giancarlostoro 1y agoSupposedly as long as you keep paying for the plan, the minutes you load into it do not expire...
- typpilol 1y agoBut tracfones don't have a plan. It's prepaid minute cards only.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoI have an Ultra Mobile eSIM as a second line on my iPhone. Costs $3/mo and you can buy cards to top it up or add a credit card. My primary eSIM is a regular phone plan. It works surprisingly well. I can easily turn off the second line in Settings without removing it. I could’ve bought an unlocked phone with cash somewhere and used the SIM in that. They wouldn’t know who I was. I didn’t do that because it was inconvenient and it wouldn’t be anonymous once I started using it for SMS authentication.
- dathinab 1y agowait what do they need a phone number for???
- criddell 1y agoI think they do that to make it more difficult for one person to open multiple accounts. You can still do it, you just need another phone.
- jiveturkey 1y agoget the cheapest possible business phone#. another line on your existing service is generally very cheap, and you can just cancel it after registration.