Screw facebook and twitter.

You know when you create a new account with any modern service, such as facebook, twitter or gmail, how you're kind of forced into giving your fucking phone number to them?

I created a brand new twitter account, the other day, I press skip for phone verification, roughly 3 minutes later my account is locked "for suspicious activity" or automated activity crap along those line, and needs a phone number to unlock... what automated activity, this is a flipping fresh account I made for personal use, so screw adding a phone number to it, whole point of me creating a separate one is not to have my number tied to it.

I've noticed practically EVERY major service does this, and it drives me mental, seems to get set off at random, even had my proper facebook account locked and needed to upload ID... who the fuck do they think they are.. very privacy intrusive, so I decided fuck it, I'm not using facebook anymore.

Why are a lot of services becoming very privacy intrusive lately? even using those disposable numbers doesn't work because literally every Nigerian scammer has gotten there hands on it because there free. grr.

Anyway else have a similar situation? I understand my bank asking me for ID, but fucking facebook, hell no I'm not giving them that, what next they want my DNA, no thanks.

Facebook is one of those odd services that are a bit like this, oh you lost your password and your email, sorry there is no way to unlock your account, oh we locked your account, hey psst give us your ID and we will unlock it... wtf

Literally, in cases like this i don't know why they just don't send you a verification email, logged in from a unknown location, that's ok click this link to login, instead of, hey lets lock your account, psst we need ID or you're never getting your account back.

So I quit with facebook lol.

I make sure to moon my back yard every morning, just so the NSA gets a good look.

Yeah I'm very afraid of privacy too. I think it will get worse in the future.

With most free online services, they are making money by selling advertising. You (or specifically your attention) is the product that they are selling to generate their revenue.

Having an accurate picture of their user base makes it more valuable to their advertisers, which means they can sell you for more money.

Think about it from an advertisers perspective.. what do you think would be more valuable:

Package 1:
- We have a whole bunch of users, but we know almost nothing about them. Many of them are likely fake accounts or multiple accounts owned by the same person.

Package 2:
- We have a whole bunch of users. While some may be fake, most are probably actual people because we require a legit phone number for signup. In addition, we use data from that phone number to validate much of their other personal information.

Obviously it's package 2. Advertisers are going to pay more money for a bunch of people whom they have more confidence are real and have accurate information in their profile. This is why most of the major players (facebook, google, etc) that depend on ad revenue are making it harder to sign up with fake information and making an effort to weed out existing users who signed up with falsified information.

Shybug said:

You know when you create a new account with any modern service, such as facebook, twitter or gmail, how you're kind of forced into giving your fucking phone number to them?

I created a brand new twitter account, the other day, I press skip for phone verification, roughly 3 minutes later my account is locked "for suspicious activity" or automated activity crap along those line, and needs a phone number to unlock... what automated activity, this is a flipping fresh account I made for personal use, so screw adding a phone number to it, whole point of me creating a separate one is not to have my number tied to it.

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I had the same exact thing happen to me with one of the new accounts I created. If I remember correctly, I just got in touch with support and got it unlocked.

I've noticed practically EVERY major service does this, and it drives me mental, seems to get set off at random, even had my proper facebook account locked and needed to upload ID... who the fuck do they think they are.. very privacy intrusive, so I decided fuck it, I'm not using facebook anymore.

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Never had it happen to me other than for Twitter. Though for twitter it didn't require me to give any sort of private information.

Why are a lot of services becoming very privacy intrusive lately? even using those disposable numbers doesn't work because literally every Nigerian scammer has gotten there hands on it because there free. grr.

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XD Well, it's not a matter of privacy, it's more a matter of security. Blame people who choose terrible passwords and get hacked.

Anyway else have a similar situation? I understand my bank asking me for ID, but fucking facebook, hell no I'm not giving them that, what next they want my DNA, no thanks.

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LOL ... well to be fair, an ID isn't exactly all that private. All it's doing is identifying who you are. This may have a lot to do with all the crap that goes on facebook. If someone does something, they likely want to be albe to identify who exactly is doing it.

Literally, in cases like this i don't know why they just don't send you a verification email, logged in from a unknown location, that's ok click this link to login, instead of, hey lets lock your account, psst we need ID or you're never getting your account back.

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I am glad i never had tihs occur, but all my accounts are fairly old and at one point I did have a phone number on them

Let me give you a run down of Privacy myths.

#1 your drivers licence and state identification is public domain and can be accessed by anyone for age verification and criminal background.

#2. I See this a lot in classifieds and Facebook sale posts. Blocking your licence plate in a picture because murderers and hackers can find you and steal your identifacation. Is also false as vehicle registration has no info beyond address and owner name and like state ID, the database is kept as public access in a public domain.

#3 phone numbers are public access in a public domain registered to a service user under a contractual lease.

#4 a public email server (google, yahoo, msn, AOL, ect.) Are also part of the public domain with Public Access the only things on those servers that you have any entitled privacy and rights to are the emails within your inbox but the use of the address the same way as a phone number is under a contractual lease when you close your account you are recycling that address back to that server to be used Again by someone else. A private email server on a paid domain are secure and retain user ownership.

there is nothing that these Services require that is actually classified as personal information whether you realize it or not your legal name is also stored in a public domain once you are over the age of 18 the only piece of personal information that a person say in America has that is truly theirs and not in the public domain would be your social security number and place of birth beyond that most everything else is hosted as public access or classified as public access. If you're really that paranoid about security how about you actually read the user license agreement before clicking that little I agree button because no matter how you classify it as long as you click I agree you are bound by a legal contract that they disclosed everything that they would use your information for that's why reading those is extremely important there's a lot you can learn by reading the fine print and a lot of these free services are not really free like it was mentioned before they are selling you as a user with your interest to advertisers they don't give away any of your personal information such as name or exact date of birth but they do give general information such as your gender your age group and your general location to pinpoint advertisements that would highly pertain to you as well as tracking any activity you perform while logged into their services it allows them to create a more specific advertising profile thus maximizing their profits and allowing your service to stay free. This is why I have such a problem with socialism because there is no such thing as free for a service or object to be offered equal amount of time or material must also be offered to create said product or service. For these services to stay operational they must pay for their domain and staff, if they offer a free service and bring $0 in from their user base, how do they pay their staff to maintain their service and pay their domain fees to remain active?

Answer: they must generate advertisement revenue to the amount to pay for bandwidth allotments, domain usage, and regular staff.

Yup... I especially hate when things try to force me to use real life information! One example.... I wanted to be ShippoFox on Telegram, but I couldn't. Someone IRL could find out by phone number that I had an account.... and then see my babyfur @screenname. So I had to go with something else. I really wish Telegram offered more privacy... like a way to disable people from finding you by phone number.

ShippoFox said:

Yup... I especially hate when things try to force me to use real life information! One example.... I wanted to be ShippoFox on Telegram, but I couldn't. Someone IRL could find out by phone number that I had an account.... and then see my babyfur @screenname. So I had to go with something else. I really wish Telegram offered more privacy... like a way to disable people from finding you by phone number.

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I tried to register with Telegram myself, but apparently all of my phone numbers are "invalid" and there has been zero response from their technical support staff for quite some time now. By the end, I considered it a scam to collect phone numbers rather than an actual service. You're not missing anything, FWIW, as far as I can tell.

Call me odd, but I never got into Facebook, Twitter, or other forms of social networking. Aside from privacy issues, I never really saw what they could do that could not be accomplished by other methods (email, forums, etc.). Admittedly, I am not particularly interested in tracking down people I haven't seen since high school, given my introversion (some have said that social networking is useful for that). Personally, I will stick with the "old fashioned" methods.

"An ad for LLmedico popped up in my Facebook" ever clicked a like button somewhere? One can only imagine the web that is created by clicking all the like and dislike buttons etc.. and then which one will be the click that makes the really big link back through all that "interest" data. I cannot even imagine what data mining is producing. Imagine the data the search engines sell to everyone else, I am sure that has IP numbers attached to it. Eventually, all sorts of "matches" start happening.

Sapphyre said:

I tried to register with Telegram myself, but apparently all of my phone numbers are "invalid" and there has been zero response from their technical support staff for quite some time now. By the end, I considered it a scam to collect phone numbers rather than an actual service. You're not missing anything, FWIW, as far as I can tell.

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I joined, but just not the way I wanted. I'm using a non-babyfur name. And I'm avoiding joining any compromising groups.

I also have some complaints about Steam's privacy settings. You can hide everything, but you can't hide just your groups, why? I don't want to totally hide my profile... just the things I think people have no business seeing. So... I'm also very careful of what groups I join on there.