https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHO...
These lists made sense in 2000-2010 when programmers had the autonomy ( in most corporations ) to decide on what feature to develop and how it should behave.
This hasn't been the case since the industry introduced roles such as product owner.
I've had to implement my fair share of anti patterns that I was fully aware would degrade the experience for the user. At the end of the day, the programmers have been reduced to essentially blue color workers that just do whatever the MBAs decide on.
Perhaps it’s possible you didn’t do enough to explain why you didn’t believe it was the right work to do, or if you did, perhaps there were other factors in play than “user experience.”
Also, uh, “I have to do what my boss says” doesn’t make you a blue collar worker.
I know, I was exaggerating. I thought it was clear from my usage of the word "essentially".
> perhaps there were other factors in play than “user experience.”
Of course there were. There always are - chief among them the profitability, because selling the customer on stuff they didn't need is profitable. Especially if you frame it "right".
But that example is completely unrelated to this case, to very little value in getting deeper into it.
No, but it does make you a non-professional. The distinction between professionals and non-professionals is that members of professions have ethical obligations above and beyond their obligation to their employer.
You will not find lawyers willing to perjure themselves, accountants to cook your books, or civil engineers happy to sign off on deadly designs.
In contrast, software "engineers" are not professionals, we are hired goons and you can easily find a software monkey ready to build whatever atrocity you want for the right price.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cxe9g0el8epo
https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/practice/general-practice/ac...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tesco-fraud...
“The three defendants who are on trial in this case are not the foot soldiers who misconducted themselves. The defendants in this case are the generals – those who are in positions of trust, and who were paid huge compensation packages in order to safeguard the financial health of Tesco.
“These defendants encouraged the manipulation of profits and indeed pressurised others working under their control to misconduct themselves in such a way that the stock market was ultimately misled.”"
> [...] ethical obligations above and beyond their obligation to their employer. You will not find lawyers willing [on behalf of their employer] to perjure themselves [...]
but based on their response to your the examples, :shrug:.
[Many/most ethical] accountants [who are not committing malpractice] will tell their employer, "no, I can't sign off on those fraudulent financial statements," but software developers [as a community, I'm sure someone will pop up with one colorful example] will not tell their employer, "No, I won't run fake bots on the site to inflate our user numbers," or "No, I won't implement this browser fingerprinting to violate our users' privacy."
The sibling commenter seems to be willfully misreading this as "all lawyers are ethical"
You will struggle to find any similar news stories for "software engineer jailed for implementing dark patterns"
And probably because that's not illegal.
Unintentionally revealing comment here. Software goons have no concept of professional ethics and will do any terrible thing you pay them to do.
I'm going to stop here because this is just an exercise in silly faux ignorance on your part.
Papa Smurf will not be pleased to hear about this.
Falsehoods programmers believe?
edit: i gotta change my first guess that it will be modified soon. google does not set the goal to not be evil, so they'll likely just leave the repo as-is, unattended.
quote: 1. An individual has a phone number
Some people do not own phones, or do not wish to provide you with their telephone number when asked. Do not require a user to provide a phone number unless it is essential, and whenever possible try to provide a fallback to accommodate these users.
- Projects under the `google` GitHub organization is from Google itself (Google for some reason force projects from Google employees to be umbrellaed under their own organization for some reason, even if it's a personal project)
- Google follows their own rules (applies to any "Big Tech" company)
- Google actually cares about correcting mistakes unless they hit the news/social media
- YouTube and Google tries to make the experience for you, the consumer (on YouTube: consumer = creators + viewers), as good as they can
It does seem this repo is “from Google.”
For example, yapf[0] is under the Google Github org but has the disclaimer:
>Note YAPF is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.
libphonenumber doesn't have any similar disclaimer and does seem to be an "official" Google product, but it's hard to tell what Google considers official or not.
I don't think that is true. Google employees can have regular personal projects. If you have a "personal" project that is done under the scope of your employment (e.g., you work on YouTube and you wrote a tool to, I dunno, manage Makefiles to help yourself and/or other coworkers, then that would be a "Google project" housed under `google` even though it's not an "official" product).
>> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
But that has nothing to do with this. The idea here is that whoever is paying the phone bill is the same person who uses the phone. Nobody believes that.
I don’t bother to update the names on their lines, so they all probably link back to me.
Family plans are pretty common here, so I wouldn’t expect too much friction.
I would absolutely cooperate (obviously through a lawyer) with records if someone else on my family plan did something illegal.
I also have records showing that they pay me for the line.
Also yes, it would be a huge hassle. The probability of that happening is small, and I’m willing to risk it like many other things in life. I only do this for very trusted people.
Validating an account with a phone number constitutes phone use so, yes, Google and Youtube have shown an instance of belief that the person paying is the same as the person who uses.
>> It wasn't even that long ago that mobile phones didn't exist, and it was common for an entire household to share one fixed-line telephone number. In some parts of the world, this is still true, and relatives (or even friends) share a single phone number. Many phone services (especially for businesses) allow multiple inbound calls to or outbound calls from the same phone number.
----
¹ https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHO...
This should be a hint that you've misdiagnosed the problem... shouldn't it?
Having his phone bill paid by his mom makes it his mom's phone number by default; it's then shared with him, making it a non-unique identifier. That's why it falls into Falsehood #4 (and likely into Falsehood #3, assuming that his mom has a separate phone number that she doesn't share with anyone else).
No, it makes his mom the account owner. Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number. Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO. It’s nonsensical. The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.
Which makes the phone numbers under her account hers.
> Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number.
It absolutely does mean that her number is actually your number. That you choose to share it with her doesn't change that; you can revoke that sharing at any time, or even cancel the line entirely.
(And of course, if both of you jointly own the account, then the numbers therein would simultaneously belong to both of you.)
> Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO.
Is the phone bill under the accountant's name and paid from the accountant's personal bank account in this hypothetical? Or is it under her employer's name, and paid from her employer's bank account? The answer to that question determines the owner of the CEO's phone number, and in neither case is the CEO himself personally the owner of that number.
> The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.
And if that assigned person was the son then it would've been the son's name that Google pulled instead of his mother's, and Google's ignorance of its own advice would've gone unnoticed.
My understanding and assumptions are evidently no worse than yours.
> account owners are different than account payers are different than account assignees
For residential/personal phone plans, they are not. In my T-Mobile account there is exactly one person who can be designated as the owner, payer, and assignee for all of the lines on my account, that person being me. I can at most change the label on a given line, but that label can be literally anything.
> Google is tying to account payers, not assignees.
There is no notion of an "assignee" from any perspective that Google can see. There is only the account payer, which is one and the same with the account owner.
(If the payer is not the owner, then that's called fraud and is a crime in most countries.)
> This is clearly incorrect to everyone else in this comment section.
And it's also clearly incorrect by Google's own guidelines as quoted above. That's the entirety of my point.
We're obviously not going to change each other's minds, so this is probably the point where we should agree to disagree and move on. Last word's yours.
At least SMS is easy to divert that way. Think about the services that verify over Whatsapp or Telegram. Good luck finding someone who cares there.
Phone/Gas/Electricity/Internet/Cable etc bills can be paid through any of the hundred-odd mobile wallet apps. Other than some exceptional cases, none of them require access to the linked phone number.
The UK treats "utility bills" as proof of address. Yes, these are trivially forgeable and often incorrect. Yes, it's a big pain that you don't exist if you're not paying bills.
The US even tries to make its overseas nationals pay tax. As a result, everyone everywhere in the world who wants to get paid by Amazon has to sign a US tax form saying they're not a US taxpayer.
The answer is goodwill and doing the right thing.
Spent the last few months trying to explain to a randomly changing E.ON representative how unacceptable it was for them to send bills with my name on it to a non-existent address.
I moved out of the country in 2018.
They've offered me £10 credit. That I can't use, because I left the country.
I need to gather all the emails together and send them to the ombudsman, but there's around 80 emails now.
I mean, I guess you could do something with the DKIM signature, but good luck getting non-technical people to forward a mail in a way which leaves that intact. Realistically the best you're getting is a butchered screenshot.
Your manager / PM: "Make this change, it's how Google is doing things now."
Yet it's so obviously wrong, but if you push back.. not good for you.
I'm almost inclined to think maybe the process/tech isn't designed to do this and there's a bug, or somebody tasked with a manual verification made an outright mistake, or something else went off the rails. Any number of this could have gone wrong.
Then I think of the number of sites and services that have started asking for phone numbers, as if they believe doing it over and over will somehow change the nature of telephony--it would probably be a mistake for me to give Google or any of these other companies the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe the process isn't that great after all.
You couldn't do a phone->name or address->name lookup
Which reminds me that someone claimed that the income/amount of tax paid is the most private data American citizens have (the context was the DOGE/payments stuff), meanwhile every Swedish residents income is very public information.
Individual workers and even entire teams don't matter. They are just another cog in a massive machine. Customer service representatives are forced to follow a script, and they are technically unable to deviate from it. After all, if there's an override button, it just takes one of your tens of thousands of minimum-wage workers to go rogue to end up with a massive compromise.
To fix it you need your manager's manager's manager to file a change request, which will be put on an endless backlog to be potentially looked at by two dozen teams a few years from now. And if it's not a frequently-occurring issue, it's not worth the effort. Google isn't going to fix it because as an organization they aren't even aware you exist. You are collateral damage, and they are totally fine with that.
The only way around this is to shortcut the entire process. Post on HN and hope some manager high enough in the policy/tech chain can be bothered to personally agenda the issue.
2040: 4 hour ago your body separated from your phone, drink a verification can
>
> > 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
The whiteboard algorithmic interview didn’t prepare nor test for this.
It sounds like someone at Google (not necessarily a programmer) needs to read "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers:"
> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
What a bureaucratic nightmare.