
Ask HN: Why are more and more websites asking for phone numbers? - notbingo
Some, outright demand it. This would be considered unacceptable just 2 years ago. They don&#x27;t even pretend it&#x27;s for 2FA now.
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ac29
What I find most annoying is mandatory SMS confirmation for business accounts.
We've got plenty of phones at work, but they cant receive text messages, so
employees have to use personal cellphones to open accounts on these types of
services.

If your site does this and doesn't offer a actual phone call option, see if
you can do something about it. A company I opened an account with a couple
weeks ago almost lost our business over this -- seemed very unprofessional. I
can guess why this company requires verification, its an attempt to stop bots
from signing up en masse to get the small free portion of the service (first X
amount was free, if I could script creation and use of 100 free accounts, I'd
never need to pay them).

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closeparen
Spam and abuse are much easier problems to solve when it's reasonably
difficult to obtain a new identifier with a clean reputation.

As much as you may consider it your human right to open thousands of new
untraceable accounts per second with full functionality at zero cost, humoring
you requires bending over backwards and resorting to a cat-and-mouse arms race
of probabilistic anti-spam and anti-bot techniques. As the adversaries get
good, it becomes more and more attractive to just require a phone number (and
block well-known bulk suppliers of anonymous phone numbers like Google Voice,
Twilio, and Flowroute).

I think this is actually a pretty reasonable arrangement. Someone motivated to
stay pseudonymous can obtain a handful of extra phone numbers in a way that
would take some effort to connect to his real identity. It's better than
drivers license scans or credit card verification.

I think the only realistic alternative would be a proof-of-work scheme. This
could protect privacy better, while still making it inordinately difficult to
overwhelm a site operator with millions of pseudonyms for the same person. But
there are no real standards here. More people have SMS than BTC.

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Hnrobert42
Slow down there. Where's this hostility coming from? I would rather not give
my phone number to companies either.

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doronrotem
I agree with you: I would rather not give my phone number to companies either.

But once you start to see spam or get spam messages from other users (imagine
a dating site) you would like this spam to stop. Having a (unique) phone
number a mandatory requirement during registration can make spam fighting much
easier.

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k5hp
Phone numbers are more convenient in contrary to email: every individual has
only one phone number, which hardly ever changes. They consider the phone
number as unique identifier of a user.

Many websites think that lots of users have multiple emails and thus maybe
sign up twice. Again, it's only about convenience.

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Piskvorrr
"every individual has only one phone number, which hardly ever changes"

[Citation-needed] As someone who had been holding _three_ different phone
numbers at the same time, and who used to be accessible at about 10 different
cellphone numbers, I feel you are mistaking your beliefs for facts.

~~~
nabla9
Outliers don't matter for marketing.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Fair point.

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Doches
> would be considered unacceptable...

A more honest way of saying this would be that it wouldn't have worked --
requiring a phone number during onboarding would drastically lower your
conversion rates. So what's changed? Is this a generational (grumble grumble
millenial grumble grumble) thing?

Also, I'd love to know what sparked your asking this question. I don't see a
particular uptick in services requiring a phone number for signup, which is
something I'd have definitely noticed as I don't carry a phone.

~~~
notbingo
Twitter demanding a phone number to unlock a 5 min old account after saying it
was optional and then pretending I broke their rules just to get my phone
number.

As for the uptick in services requiring phone numbers? All the messaging apps,
all the freelance websites, facebook, google, classified ad sites/apps. And
these are just examples of things I tried using.

~~~
Doches
I use/have used literally all of the things on that list, and none have
required a phone number for normal use. I've had Facebook, Google, and Twitter
all require phone numbers when I've naively tried to set up bots against their
services, though, which is what I'm guessing you're having trouble with here.

~~~
notbingo
>works for me.

You guessed wrong. If I was trying to set up bots, why would I start blabbing
about it on HN? Oh right, you assumed I'm like you.

~~~
popey456963
Calm down, personal insults aren't necessary. I have to admit I've had the
same experience, don't know my phone number and don't carry it with me for the
majority of the time and I've needed it twice so far. Once for a Twitter bot
and once for a Telegram bot.

Never before have I been asked for a phone number that hasn't been optional
from any other service (of which I have quite a few, LastPass counts about
2,200 of them).

(Of course, sometimes I do still take the optional road, two factor
authentication is exceptionally nice).

~~~
tgragnato
Many services support otp authentication and don't require a phone number for
2fa anymore.

facebook, google, dropbox, evernote, github, gitlab, amazon, ...

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kumarski
Lead qualification as a service is a growing segment.

[http://www.upcall.com](http://www.upcall.com) is a thing.

Also, people are tired of bots signing up.

[http://ringcaptcha.com](http://ringcaptcha.com) is a thing.

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Razengan
Didn't Google spearhead this behavior? One of the biggest reasons I don't use
Gmail.

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squarefoot
How do you deal with spam? This is the one and only reason why I still use
Gmail. Many years ago I tried IPCop plus a trainable spam filter addon; it
worked well but required constant attention/tweaking because spam is a moving
target, so in the end I gave up.

~~~
Razengan
I had Hotmail/Live/Outlook, Gmail and iCloud accounts at the time I started
gravitating to iCloud (mostly because there I had gotten the exact address
that I wanted, and convenient aliases), and at that time, the level of spam I
got was the same on Gmail and iCloud: next to none.

In 7 years that I've been using it exclusively I must've seen barely 5-10 junk
emails on the 2 iCloud accounts (6 addresses in all) that I use.

Poor Outlook on the other hand.. I check my old accounts for sentimental
reasons once every few months, and they're still beleaguered by spam.

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taprun
I'd suggest that you read about the Overton window:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)

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wizzerking
I never give out my cell phone to any company. Doing so constitutes "prior
business" , and so putting my cell phone on the do not call list is moot. I
get enough crap phone calls for people who had this number before me. It is
too expensive to have a crap or garbage cell phone, like I have crap or
garbage email adresses

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nabla9
It helps to identify users in the real world for long term.

It's relatively common to have multiple email addresses. Fewer people buy
extra SIM just to have a pseudonym.

If the website decides to sell your information to advertising companies,
banks or insurance companies, they can use phone number to attach users even
if the other identifying information is false or slightly different. It adds
directly into the bottom line.

Carlos Danger needs dual SIM phone.

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sebringj
Doesn't it help ensure the user is using a phone and can get notifications
when you couple it with a text message code entry? Then you can skip the
typical authentication flow? I would think it would be quicker overall for
signup and for making the code simpler but I guess weird for users not used to
it.

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retox
I don't know if it happens anymore but Facebook used to ask you to scan and
send them a government photo ID like a passport. Absolute madness, one more
step towards making real identifications on the internet a normal thing. Tech
companies are pushing towards a nightmare web.

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boraturan
Because they can target you with you Facebook and Google ads.

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taf2
If I'm selling something especially a service than most likely we will need to
talk. Having your phone number makes this much easier to kick start.

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LarryMade2
I've been thinking on making a user forum - some people don't have email - so
human verification could be alternatively done by text/voice.

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jamez1
So that advertisers can upload a list of phone numbers and have the ads target
those people.

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_RPM
And Birthday.

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teslacar
stop spam and automated sign-ups

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shintakezou
Those things will find their way out… but the nuisance for common legitimate
well-behaving users will be kept, likely.

