Comment by anon-sre-srm

Wrong forum for this question. I wanted universal chat, file transfer, and clipboard sharing across the big 3 desktop and big 2 mobile OSes without being tied to a universal, privacy-invading, primary key like a phone number. Using phone numbers for signup is only a couple degrees from using social security numbers for customer accounts in the 90's. Captchas and account expiry are some of the proper forms of abuse prevention that don't leap straight to privacy invasion with a not truly portable or anonymous unique identifier.