Heck, if I wanted ethical purity, I wouldn't be here contributing free content to YC. But I think the net good outweighs the net harm, so here I am.
In many parts of the world, getting a phone number requires recording your government ID with the carrier (and burners are illegal, though usually for the carrier not the consumer), so the calculus then becomes “to prove you’re not a spammer, give up everything about your identity that was or ever will be known”. Which, no.
(There’s a reason why Russian democracy activists are divided into a “use Signal” camp and a “fuck no, don’t use Signal, doxxing you will be slipping $20 to a random SIM card salesman” camp. But parts of Western Europe are the same, and some are even ahead on e.g. availability of anonymous stored-value cards for transport or mandating testifying against yourself wrt encrypted storage.)
1. Despite this, spam thrives on Google.
2. What happened to using AI to fight spam? Trained and intelligent humans can discern spam without knowing identity.
3. This still won’t prevent other email providers sending spam to Gmail.
4. Safety is often used as justification for more $$$.
Because there are two independent components to such a system: {increase cost of identity} + {protect privacy of identity}
When it's offered/justified to combat spam... the implication is that the solution will deliver both promises.
In reality, the first (concept of identity) gets built, marketing/sales realizes they can abuse the hell out of it for their ends, the second (privacy protection) gets overruled at the VP/C* level, and any privacy protections are quietly never implemented.
This happens again. And again. And again.
Google is probably the best case ethical scenario here, in regards to having standards around privacy data stewardship, and even they abuse it frequently when the profit is too large to ignore.
The only reasonable takeaway is that any system that permits mass tracking is too dangerous to privacy to allow to exist, and all should be opposed.
Or, as GDPR does, render companies liable for omissions from a privacy perspective.
The most ridiculous part of this phone-verification BS is that many companies (e.g. Twitter, Discord) let you create an account without it but will then demand a number at some point later. This only hurts real users because spammers can just switch IPs and create a new account that they can use for a while.
> Google Voice will give you one for free
And what information do you have to give Google for that number so that you can avoid giving your phone number to Google?
> to put URLs in the descriptions [...] Phone number "verification" is nasty
Spam is a huge problem for any large platform with free accounts, and there aren't a lot of good options to prevent it. One set of mitigations is around increasing the cost of an identity. Email addresses are infinite and free, but working phone numbers are limited and usually cost money. So gating spammer-desired activities on phone numbers makes sense from their perspective. They could get a similar effect by requiring a credit card number, but people hate that even more.
If you'd like to work around this, I'd suggest getting another number for just this. Google Voice will give you one for free, and the Burner app will do it for $5/month if you sign up via web. Or in my case, my ISP gives me a free landline number with my internet service, which is great for this sort of thing.