[thaumasiotes]

> 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

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.

[smgit]

I have an Indian colleague whose dad was in some kind of coma for few months after an accident. He had a real crazy time keeping the house running. His dad's number was attached to all kinds of bills - electricity, gas, milk, water, internet, cable, newspapers etc. Most of the services would send a verification sms to his dad's phone for any kind of interaction. No one knew the password. And it turned into a major nightmare. It wasn't just a question of paying the bills. Lot of these services had to be shutdown or have settings changed temporarily. And each one had a different set of documents/processes required to prove he was a relative.

[sieve]

The only place where the phone number really matters in India is when dealing with banks, AADHAR and the phone company.

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.

[lmz]

Remove the SIM card and pop it into some other phone? Unless the SIM has a PIN lock, but I guess you could go to the telco for help with that.

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.

[smgit]

He was in a different location initially. He eventually got access to the sim. So every process requiring sms verification became a roadblock.

[kazinator]

It is related. The belief that a phone number maps to a single person, the one paying the the phone bill, is a form of belief that a phone number uniquely identifies an individual. The reality is that the number identifies two individuals: the mom paying the bill and the user of the phone.

[thaumasiotes]

No one believes now, or ever has believed, that the person paying a phone bill is the same person who uses the phone. That's not the way money works.

[kazinator]

According to the bizarre anecdote in this HN submission, the person who pays for the phone bill must be the person who is validating a YouTube account with that phone number.

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.

[rixed]

I don't know if it is still the case, but in the past Android would let you create several user accounts on a single phone.

[Y_Y]

To be completely fair, Android also allows having multiple sims and phone numbers on a single phone. I've never heard of people sharing a device without sharing the number, but it's possible.

[david_allison]

It's still the case. I have at least 4 on the same number.

[chrisandchris]

This belief gets very interesting with company phones, where 1 person pays several hundreds/thousand phones. Oh wait, that's not a person but a legal entity?

[wink]

I don't even want to guess the percentage of couples where one partner pays for (both, maybe three) phones/landlines, and that's ignoring all children, underage or not.

[diggan]

Don't remember what service exactly (Paypal I think?) that some time ago asks for me to "verify" the account by showing some bills with my name. At that point, the only utility bills they accepted for the verification, were all in my wife's name, which they didn't accept, so now I no longer have Paypal.

[wink]

Good point. I actually think we're both on some of the statements, so that's at least one problem I wouldn't have. Still ridiculous overall, of course.

[grapesodaaaaa]

I currently pay for 4 other people, because the way plans work in the US, it’s a lot cheaper.

I don’t bother to update the names on their lines, so they all probably link back to me.

[johnisgood]

So were they engage in something illegal you would be liable?

[grapesodaaaaa]

I’m sure the police would come to my door, but I could show records of it not really being “my phone number”.

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.

[onetokeoverthe]

only if police and judges are stupid.

[yellowapple]

The rationale of that falsehood¹ addresses that point:

>> 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...

[thaumasiotes]

How does that address the point? They've got nothing to do with each other. Our example user isn't sharing a phone number with his mom. He's having his phone bill paid by his mom. It is correct to believe that the number uniquely identifies him. Explaining that "all phone numbers uniquely identify a single individual" is false doesn't matter in any way, because it isn't false as applied to the phone number that's giving us trouble. That number uniquely identifies an individual.

This should be a hint that you've misdiagnosed the problem... shouldn't it?

[yellowapple]

> Our example user isn't sharing a phone number with his mom. He's having his phone bill paid by his mom.

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).

[snowe2010]

> Having his phone bill paid by his mom makes it his mom's phone number by default;

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.

[yellowapple]

> No, it makes his mom the account owner.

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.

[snowe2010]

You don’t know how phone numbers work… and you’re making really bad assumptions through your entire post. Just like shipping addresses are different than billing addresses, account owners are different than account payers are different than account assignees. Google is tying to account payers, not assignees. This is clearly incorrect to everyone else in this comment section.

[Dylan16807]

Your quote disproves you. That explanation does not address the point of who pays. It addresses what point 4 is actually about, multiple people sharing a number, which is not happening here.

[pyuser583]

Mobile phones date from the 1930s.

[pjc50]

I have some very bad news for you how ID works in countries that don't have national ID systems: companies use all sorts of awful hacks instead.

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.

[ben_w]

> 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.

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.

[hyperman1]

I've always vaguely wondered how the US knows who to tax, if they have no complete, trustworthy register of who the citizens are and where they live. It presumably works, I just don't understand how.

[pjc50]

They rely on a number of inefficient proxy systems, like the UK: making employers keep track of the tax of employees, and making all the banks report "suspicious" transactions.

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.

[htrp]

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/accounting/v...

The answer is goodwill and doing the right thing.

[crote]

How does that even work these days? Taking a picture of a bill physically mailed to you is bad enough, but all of my utility bills nowadays are nothing more than an email! How's that supposed to prove anything?

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.

[_trampeltier]

In a lot of cases, the company payes the phone bill or there are sometimes family plans, so there is just one bill for the whole family.