This is flat out untrue. You don't need to provide any of that information to Apple in order to activate an iPhone. I know this because I've had to activate a phone (iPhone 7) that's on the latest OS with a dead SIM card and was able to bypass both the iCloud step and the iTunes account step without entering any info.

There seems to be a lot of this willful misinformation being posted around this article. I wonder why HN is now getting inundated with this anti-Apple nonsense.