Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.
replyWalmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!
> Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company
replyHoly moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?
in the US? no.
replyBut I don't think that's the case for Bluesky
replyIt's because of spam. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
replyIronically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.