Comment by godelski
5 days ago
> To me the obvious example is fraud/abuse protection.
Phones are notorious for spam...
Seriously. How can the most prolific means of spam be used to prevent fraud and abuse? (Okay, maybe email is a little more prolific?) Like have you never received a spam call or text? Obviously fraudsters and abusers know how to exploit those systems... it can't be more obvious...
It costs money to get a phone number. It’s about friction, not elimination.
What would you do instead?
I'm saying it clearly isn't enough friction. It's not worth the privacy cost. Which let's be real, those numbers are then commonly sold to those same spammers, even if indirectly.
You are also forgetting it is easy to mask, obscure, and hijack numbers. So it doesn't cost money per number, many times they can use their own number.
There isn't a universal solution, which is the main problem here. Sometimes numbers make sense, most of the time not.
Ok so you don’t like phone numbers. I get it.
But you’re OpenAI. You need to do _something_. What do you do?
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