Comment by giancarlostoro

Having a handful of companies that can contact you has created a land of monopoly hyperscalers.

It's so hard to build anything big and durable because they've created these steep gradients.

It's too bad there's no one willing to be a parking lot attendant on an Italian island.

In the UK, I believe parking companies need to have a way to pay without the app but it's usually so bloody inconvenient that it's about the same as requiring it.

Physical machines can be confusing too :)

When I was in Italy last summer, I couldn't figure out how to pay with my card at the machine in a small town, where you'd park to walk into an ancient city on a hill*. I asked two Italian woman for help and even with being able to read the Italian + having paid with coins themselves, they struggled to help me understand the combination of steps required to pay with card.

In my city in Northern California our downtown uses an app for parking now. I don’t use it so it’s still an option, but you have to goto a kiosk, enter your license plate number, and pay with card. It’s made the downtown more of a ghost town (admittedly it was already dying) and the boomers with cash just don’t go. The younger 20somethings all complain “boomers are too stupid to use an app” and have no concern for privacy apparently. Welcome to the future I guess.

You need to find a working parking metre which may or may not work, accept cards or give back change. Also most if not all of parking apps allow you to pay by the exact minute and extended your stay dynamically from the go, while with a paper ticket you need to go back to the car and get another one before it expires

I do wonder if the "illegal not to accept cash" laws in some states have been applied to this situation.

Note that sometimes the risk is low, and changing your plate is cheaper if you do get a fine...

Essentially too bad. Look at the parkmobile disaster.

Park City, Utah - although there were meters that could accept card or cash available, none worked. App was the only functional way to pay. This was 3-4 years ago, not during ski season but getting close to it (October or November).

Australia: some companies are app only

You can't, no. It's the same story in Sicily. You can only pay for parking using an app, if you don't have a smartphone you just can't park. Luckily the parking app they have is pretty nice, but the requirement is infuriating

That's actually a common scam that happens, too. It's a constant problem in my city, and while I already have the app downloaded on my phone others do not and find themselves getting nasty bills in the mail months later.

Roll the dice; pay the ticket if cited. The cost of parking.

In the States, they tow your car to a yard and hold it ransom until you fork out a $1K or so (depends on the state/municipality), with accrued daily surcharges. And, good luck finding the yard. They also only take cash or debit so that you cannot run a chargeback later on. I'd rather just pay a $300 ticket, don't tow my car.

Ive bumped into these been banned too. Apples temp addresses worked well where these didnt.

Proton does require phone number now. It's not anaonymous email provider anymore.

Yes, but

- the apps almost always allow you to remotely increase your stay - the apps almost always allow you to pay by the exact minute instead of by the quarter/half an hour

I think Reddit falls under this category.

> If your website will block me out because I used a privacy friendly email, I want nothing to do with your website.

IDK I’ve appreciated Reddit killing off good features like old version, putting a time-lock banner on mobile while logged out, trying to block VPNs when logged out, etc.

I want that company devalued and bought by Verizon or AOL to die a Yahoo death.

What is insane to me is how few people realize their stock has a higher P/E than nVidia… and it isn’t because of some bullshit minor AI data deals. It’s a youth-forward narrative machine, and everyone knows it.

Even .us ??? Pretty sure I used my usual domain (enslaves.us) with them for wireless and california landline and u-verse.

Do you mean it was failing with a >3 character TLD?

MVNO fwiw. Mobile virtual network operator.

I use my real email for those or I sign up with a new email from my new burner domain.

Oh yes, so many websites are incompetent like that.

And of course after registering with foo+bar@example.com they will happily send invoices to bar@example.com

The + has no special meaning in the standards, and thus removing it will just result in invalid addresses in many cases…

So I guess the solution is just to begin to allow accounts to always register multiple emails? Although I guess the issue of multiple accounts is still going to exist if the users don't know the initial (private) email that they signed up with though unless there is a different unique ID that everyone will be able to remember.

I'm curious (and not trolling by asking) what a solution might be since email has been used as a unique account identifier for so long it is hard for my brain to think of another option at the moment.

I'm curious what you think the difference is between "a paying iCloud user" and "an anonymous rando off the internet." How many Apple gift cards do you reckon get sent to fraudsters every day? Decades worth of iCloud+ surely.

I'm running a business where I need to know who you are, because my platform can be used defraud other people. If you're trying to hide who you are from our very first interaction, that's a massive red flag.

If you can trivially create hundreds of these emails, and fill in the rest of the required info with bought/stolen/generated PII, now I have a vector for mass fraud. Requiring you to use a recognized non-anonymized provider doesn't stop you, but it sure does slow you down. (It's not this simple of course, but all security works in layers)

If these terms are not acceptable to you, then great! Don't use the website, there's no need to be salty because that's what you said you wanted. Isn't it?

I don't mind either, because the number of legitimate users who are bothered by this restriction is infinitesimal compared to the number of fraudsters who would take advantage if it wasn't in place. It can be difficult to comprehend the scale of platform fraud unless you've worked in this area, many days fraudulent signups outnumber legitimate ones.

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