[gurchik]

I have no problem with giving my phone number in exchange for a free service. If that changes in the future, there are a lot of self hosted Fediverse options. I just don't understand the charade of suspending a user and needing to go through an "appeal" process which automatically approves you. Just ask for the phone number during registration. I can't help but wonder if this is a plausible deniability thing where they can tell EU regulators they only collect phone numbers when they suspect fraud, and leave out that they've engineered their systems to suspect fraud by default for all new accounts.

[yomlica8]

If they were honest, more people would opt out of the deal. The waste your time signing up for an account so that there's a loss incurred by abandoning it. Then accusation is a lie that probably helps shame some percentage of people into complying or makes them afraid they've accidentally committed a crime or maybe their new account has been hacked and will be used nefariously if they don't comply.

Meta even uses this to extort driver's license scans out of long existing accounts. Twitter and Microsoft both use this altered the deal scam to get phone numbers as well for new accounts. Meta and Twitter have both been fined for using 2FA numbers for tracking in the past. They want that PII and they don't have a problem with outright lying and misusing data to get at it.

[justrealist]

There's probably some super narrow footprint of IPs, names, email registrars etc that doesn't flag a fraud check. But I doubt it's a big one.

[mistrial9]

> I just don't understand the charade

because it is that cold-blooded; it is not an agreement between equals. hint- you have no options but what they provide, can be changed at their whim basically

[EspressoGPT]

> you have no options but what they provide, can be changed at their whim basically

Are you telling me the service I've decided to sign up to defines the rules of that service?

[Folcon]

It doesn't seem to be that people are complaining about the service defining the rules, merely that the service is dishonest about what they want in exchange for your use of the "free" service.

It does seem very bait and switch.

[mistrial9]

you are one person, and one person counts for nothing.. it is a Great Game and the participants are projecting power via an app, to "clients" in the millions. Your data is aggregated. Faux-control about "signing up" is a scrap from their table.