Technology

I don't want to treat phone numbers as an ID, but for some reason my customers will give their phone number to me online far more willingly than they'll cough up their email address, which is baffling only until you realize:

• Most people are technologically incompetent and are intimidated by the avalanche of crap they get in their email, and
• They never answer their phones anyway, so who cares?

I actually offer the option, because I don't give a rat's ass how people ignore me when I try to contact them. But when they place an order I at least need to be able to prove that I tried.

Internet security and internet privacy are only incompatible goals when combined with incompetency and shit user-exerience design.

On this question of verification, I don’t have a particularly foolproof solution, but maybe there just isn’t one.

I can criticize the modern web for a lot of things, but as long as we have situations where we want to check whether an account is a real person, as opposed to FarmingBot #295038, they need something. I'm not a fan of phone verification, but I'd only criticize it when we have alternatives.

I'd even be in favor of some kind of one-way algorithm by which a trusted real-person-identifying entity could tell a random third party site: Yes, this is a genuine human.

Please. It is the most annoying part of trying to use some sites and I rather not give out my number to people who store important info in plain text files.

Bane of my life as about a year ago my dad switched his sim and immediately started pestering me about not being able to log into his accounts.

Yes he got rid of the old number completly and expected me to somehow make his logins work. This is still going on to this day when he complains to me something doesn't work it's because he's tied it to his old phone number.

I've been considering getting a pager or a burner phone just for this

• Phone numbers
• social security numbers

Stop making personal information into digital ids because when it inevitably ends up in some kind of data breach. These companies all throw their hands up saying sucks to be you.

To the same audience: quit selling my fucking phone number!

I ditched a phone number I had for 10+ years because it was leaked everywhere. Only a few short months after updating my number with the DMV and a handful of other government agencies I started receiving scam calls/messages again.

At some point we need to adopt some fucking privacy laws. This is absolutely bonkers—is no one else fed up??

Edit: I already know how to silence unknown callers. What I want is to not have the problem in the first place, ideally by 1) having companies not sell personal data to third parties and 2) being able to block spoofed (non-encrypted) caller ID.

This should be what digital ID looks like:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

mDMEZ26+ARYJKwYBBAHaRw8BAQdAsUGMjbGNUyyz9PHsHKP4xj/tIfYIuHb4miPH 0iCPpu60K0VSUk9SOiBFYXJ0aC5leGUgaGFzIGNyYXNoZWQgPG5vQGVtYWlsLmV4 ZT6IcgQTFggAGgQLCQgHAhUIAhYBAhkBBYJnbr4BAp4BApsDAAoJEI6E3uMn31Z3 028BAM5o8ER0dqTsxFlZSgZOvvgFHGuy2eFgF3rULkGKl1KrAP9fdE7WwnYbBer/ AVmw5jr0P5m/XsEQQrSueuk/FLYBBbg4BGduvgESCisGAQQBl1UBBQEBB0BDR0Bv pf4jxbwp9rVowFTnL59NGqnnh6XyF/LjAoYDGgMBCAeIYQQYFggACQWCZ26+AQKb DAAKCRCOhN7jJ99Wd1dMAP45xmN03SodkWHi7PYOORqNXJUBdMzzfsRXdqE8ZXaW vAD+PqNqPcbwJYCOEAXkg7DlZ0SX3o9MViZLdzHFQ3TpUA8= =krDh -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

PGP Key Fingerprint: 857957d40f06cc816fd3d29a8e84dee327df5677

Should be good until quantum computers come around