Comment by declan_roberts
5 days ago
It really bothers me that every dick and jane website has normalized asking for your personal phone number. It's the first thing they ask when you sign up. At this point your phone number has become your social security number of the internet.
I don't care if fighting fraud is hard for you. Figure it out without stripping away my privacy.
> It's the first thing they ask when you sign up.
It can still be worse. Imagine this: you create an account. You can use the service's free tier. You decide to pay, so you enter your name, address, and credit card number. You get charged. Then you download their app to use the service, you trigger their OAuth flow and... it requires you to enter a phone number, not letting you use your subscription for which you already paid for without a phone number. Oh and, bonus points: you can't delete your credit card information from their system. There's no reachable human customer support, and the only way to delete your CC information from their system is to delete your whole account.
Now, which service I'm talking about? OpenAI's ChatGPT Pro, or more specifically, their Codex subscription. You can subscribe to their ChatGPT Pro for $200 no problem, no phone number is necessary, but you can't actually use it in Codex without a phone number as the OAuth flow requires you to enter one. And how do I know this? Well, I'm sure you can guess... :P
> you can't delete your credit card information from their system
In cases like this (for me it has been Verizon and Adobe), you can usually change your credit card on file. Nowadays I use Privacy merchant-locked cards for everything online but in the cases where I used a physical credit card, I would change it to a Privacy card and then pause that card or put a monthly cap on charges (after making a reasonable effort to cancel.)
File a chargeback.
Claude tried demanding a photo ID from me when I tried to pay for services. I've never had that happen before. It was an _even worse_ feeling than having to give out a phone number: I can just rotate my phone number from my carrier.
I have ChatGPT Plus (and temporarily paid for Pro for 1 month in the summer) and I have never been asked for a phone number.
Maybe this is a new requirement and I am grandfathered in?
I agree with this. They should have to keep some insane bond for every phone number they keep to pay out when there is a data leak.
I enjoy Apple's Hide My Email, and it would be nice to have a similar Hide My Phone Number.
Yeah, phone numbers are essentially KYC. I use a phone number verification site, but I can't recommend them because they stopped accepting Monero recently.
For long term numbers I would use jmp.chat.
Google knows all about virtual phone numbers and won't accept them. If you don't have a number issued by a large telco, forget about creating a Google account.
JMP is a real carrier number so it should work better for 2fa than VoIP numbers.
I haven't used it yet, but I'm switching to it once my current plan runs out. There's plenty of options for data.
"fighting fraud" - never engage with these excuses. It's never been about fraud. It's always been about collecting and selling your data.
A lot of them also block voip numbers. This is obviously just a way to collect cell numbers that are easy to send spam SMS messages to.
> It really bothers me that every dick and jane website has normalized asking for your personal phone number.
The most a website will get from me is a unique email address and a bogus phone number. If it insists on verifying that phone number, it loses my business.
and then they lock it in harder by using it for 2-or-more-factor authentication
apple has dark patterns for this, trying to get your phone number into their system. You have to do something like "other options" then "don't upgrade security" or something.
Just get a second phone number for all these websites
It's super annoying, because it's normally also a path for account recovery. So if you need to change your number, good luck remembering where you have signed up with it.