
Inequality is exacerbated by the assumption that everyone has a mobile phone - seapunk
https://twitter.com/lisackaplan/status/1143275350777978880
======
oconnor663
There are many more things like this:

\- mailing addresses

\- credit cards

\- bank accounts

\- transportation

\- parents (if you're a minor)

\- literacy

There's also a big, noticeable difference between organizations designed to
serve the 90% of the population that generally has those things, and
organizations designed to serve nearly 100%. The former can look like smooth
modern startups like Airbnb or Venmo, surprisingly simple (for me) and low
friction (for me). The latter can look like giant, impossible bureaucracies
like the DMV or the IRS, who have trouble "modernizing" because all the old
systems still have to be maintained for the people who depend on them.

~~~
rjkennedy98
Transportation is the big one. Transportation in American is so poorly
designed that it basically forces an enormous (regressive) tax on everyone.
Cars are an enormous cost for the average person, and are especially needed
for service jobs of the poor. At the same time we pay huge amounts of money to
maintain suburban infrastructure for the middle/upper class at the expense of
public transit which could benefit everyone.

~~~
tastygreenapple
However, people in the suburbs pay for their infrastructure. Urban, rural, and
bicycle transportation infrastructure is funded by suburban car drivers.

I live in California and ride a motorcycle, there's no way I wear out the road
more than I pay for it and the infrastructure is shockingly bad, there are a
few roads on my commute where I have to be really smart about my positioning
because there are holes large enough to make me crash.

Fewer people can safely drive cars and we need more viable alternatives, but
giving people the infrastructure they're paying for is important too.

~~~
ant6n
Suburban drivers pay suburban property taxes which pay for the maintenance of
suburban streets.

~~~
tastygreenapple
and suburban drivers pay gas taxes, vehicle registration fees, insurance fees,
sales tax, etc. where does that go?

~~~
ant6n
Highways

~~~
tastygreenapple
If only that were the case, often car users pay for pedestrian / bicyclist
luxuries:
[https://bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/StateRevenueSourc...](https://bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/StateRevenueSources_June2014%20%281%29.pdf)

~~~
krageon
What is this obsession with who pays for what? You all live in the same
country and (broadly) pay the same taxes. Those taxes are used to fund all the
things the country needs to exist.

------
gldnspud
There are also assumptions that everyone with a mobile phone will have the
same phone number for a long time, never have their phone stolen or destroyed,
could easily replace it and restore from a backup if it were, and pay their
phone bill in a way that never results in cancellation (and thus forfeiting a
phone number).

I know someone who works at a public library and regularly interacts with
folks who've found hard times. From the stories I've heard, it's a fairly
common situation for someone to want to reset their password, then be told by
the site that they will receive a text message on a phone number "ending in
####". This is a challenge for those who had to get a new phone number since
they signed up.

~~~
justinclift
On this note, I have an old google account that wasn't used for a while.

Tried to access it recently, signing in with the _correct_ password, and it
whinged at me.

Offered to confirm that I'm "me" via SMS message to an old phone number
(probably from the UK). No idea what that number would have been, as I'm not
in the UK any more.

Alternatively, it offered to email a verification token to my email address.
Did that, received token fine.

 _Still_ couldn't access the account. So now... no access to that account, and
there's no avenue to follow up.

So, even with the _correct_ password, and _verified_ email, that account is
now forever dead. :(

No wonder I fully agree with the "these tech giants are irresponsible morons"
crowd. They've very much proven the case through their actions.

------
AngryData
Ive been excluded from more and more shit lately just because I don't have a
smart phone. I got a dumb phone for calls and SMS but even that is becoming
inadequate. Even with mobile emulators many apps and signups don't actually
work because there is no phone number registered to it and if I input my dumb
phone number they just send me shit that I can't view to my dumb phone. Living
in one of the poorest areas of the nation, I gotta save every penny I can, and
a data plan that I would use once in a blue moon with garbage network service
just isn't worth the cost. Not to mention the more expensive phone that will
inevitably get destroyed on a job site while im climbing through rafters or
jumping down in holes and shit. Google even discontinued their directions via
SMS which should be a dirt cheap service to provide, so now im back to
physical maps. Even the spammers now send me SMS messages I can't view.

Personally, I don't want to live in a world where I am forced to perpetually
be networked up and tracked and spied on everywhere I go. Yeah you can
circumvent a good bit of that if you really want to, but that is even more
time and pain in the ass to do for every little thing, extensively researching
every little app, and jail breaking all my devices so I have some sliver of
control over it, while still paying out the ass to companies and practices I
do not support. There are even government apps that require a smartphone app
to access now with no PC equivalent.

------
LorenPechtel
This is a feature, not a bug!

Employers do not like the unemployed. This is a simple way of making it hard
for the unemployed to apply. Whether it's good for society isn't their
concern.

(Personally, I think we should be working towards hiding employment status
from prospective employers. One thing I would like to see is dates should not
be allowed on resumes. You list how long you worked there, not when. They can
have the real data for a background check after making an offer of
employment.)

------
momokoko
mail.com?

There are plenty of free mail services that do not require a phone number.
Yes, gmail and many others do, But a 30 second Google search will yield
numerous options.

Feel like we just are looking for things to fit a narrative as opposed to real
issues. One of those real issues being that the gig economy is almost
completely off limits to those without a smart phone and data plan. And the
people without those two things are some of the people that would most benefit
from gig economy work.

~~~
Zenbit_UX
To be fair, I didn't know about mail.com either, 100% I would have tried in
this order:

Gmail Hotmail Yahoo ... Give up and go back to Gmail and put my phone number
in and asked the lady to call me if anything came up and to switch it one day
if she got a phone.

------
sasasassy
And the more "AI" is involved, we'll see more people excluded in a variety of
ways, the true negatives.

------
stoolpigeon
I think one solution is to make sure it's possible for everyone to have a
mobile phone. They are so important on so many levels.

In this situation in particular - needing to get an SMS without a number -
google voice is a good solution for that issue. I used it for a while when my
US bank required getting a code via SMS to a US number. I know it's a chicken
and egg thing getting it going - but if there's a way to get a person in this
situation a gmail account, a lot more stuff opens up from having that
resource.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
A free cell phone for everyone should be added to Yang 2020's platform.

~~~
tzakrajs
Obama already created a programs for mobile phones. I have a friend who got a
free smart phone from the federal government. It was android and could load
Venmo and other apps.

~~~
40acres
And he got a lot of flak for it too, "Obama phones" as a four letter word
early in his administration.

~~~
tastygreenapple
With good reason - a lot of people were hurting in the recession and watching
the government pay for smart phones for lazy good-for-nothings must have been
incredibly frustrating. If the government stopped favoring the unwilling to
work over the down-on-their-luck, we may have a less toxic political culture.

~~~
dang
If you keep posting flamebait to HN we will ban you.

------
elipsey
think this is an instance of the general problem where everyone wants to
outsource and/or automate identity verification because it’s a cost center and
they aren’t liable for failure. In some cases it’s simply impossible to
validate your identity face to face with a competent human. This problem seems
to be worst when a revenue model depends on scaling and automation.

A few examples:

\--Your free email got hijacked, and the attacker changed all the password
reset stuff to lock you out. If you followed instructions, your real answers
were easily discover-able. Instead of letting you show your state ID to a
human, Freemail uses your phone number as 2FA, so instead of paying for labor,
it’s the phone company's problem. Also, you have basically lost all your
photos and correspondence ever.

\--It’s where all your other password resets for other sites are sent, so
instead of paying a human, it’s the email company’s problem.

\--Credit card companies want spam instant lines of credit through the mail
without paying a human to check your ID before lending, so it’s the credit
bureau’s problem.

\--You can’t answer the credit bureau’s identity questions, but there’s no
human available, so it’s your problem.

\--The credit bureau leaks the data used to validate everyone’s identity, but
they’re not (substantially?) liable so it’s the public’s problem.

In a lot of these corner cases, there is no incentive for anyone to
internalize the cost of fixing things when their own automation fails. What’s
especially frustrating to me is the case where private persons are liable to
prove their own innocence when a company is negligent in lending or billing.
This seems like a cooperation problem that the market is no danger of fixing
any time soon.

------
lloeki
s/mobile phone/<x>/g with x being any of email, reliable ISP, physical
address, bank account, at various points in our history.

Interestingly enough, around here it seems like many (most even) homeless
people do have a mobile phone, save for those that actively reject societal
norms.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Even some prisoners have cell phones.

------
forgottenpass
The world is hard for people with any aspect of their life more than one
standard deviation from the cultural norm.

Also sticking with the current cultural norm, we only acknowledge the above to
be a problem when we can find "inequality" to be a contributing factor.
Everyone else can just be expected to conform unless their "why" also makes
for good headlines.

------
chme
What I also don't understand is the assumption that people don't share phone
numbers or have multiple of them.

If they want to restrict a service to a physical person, then at least in
Germany there are identification services.

------
util
Simplifying creating an account on behalf of someone else could help, it
seems. Then the author could likely have helped out the woman directly,
leveraging the trust accrued by her own account.

But if the author had her own mobile phone with her, it seems she could have
used this plus existing account creation mechanisms anyway?

------
drb311
In the UK you can sign up for a Gmail account without any other contact info -
just an unverified name and date of birth. Is this different elsewhere?

~~~
Fradow
If you try to register multiple Gmail accounts from the same location (such as
a public library), at some point Gmail will start to ask you for a phone
number verification.

This is something I saw a few years ago in France (before GDPR), there is no
reason it has changed.

I suspect it is to avoid fraudulent accounts while still letting a few mails
being registered without verification for first time users in a location.

------
nicoburns
The cheapest way to solve this would probably just be to buy everyone a
phone...

~~~
CodesInChaos
Though that wouldn't solve the privacy problem, since there are many privacy
hostile countries in where you're required to verify your identity to buy a
sim card.

------
ptah
how about having simless phones in libraries and people get to put their sim
cards in? it's much cheaper or even free to get a simcard in some cases

