Ask HN: Does Instagram suspend accounts just to get their phone numbers?
I registered for an Instagram account today. Immediately after I signed in for the first time, I was suspended due to violating the Community Guidelines. I appealed, which they require a phone number to do so. After verifying my phone number, I was immediately redirected to an unsuspended page. "We reviewed your account and found that it does follow our Community Guidelines." It happened too fast for a human to have been involved. I've heard of this happening recently to other people as well[1].
Is this a required flow in order to siphon phone numbers from new accounts without making it "required" on the sign up page?
1: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/8/4.html
80 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadAnd suddenly you're in the system.
I've resorted to hawking sites like BugMeNot and using the trash/spam accounts there, which usually manage to have some phone number or have performed some sort of weird exploit to get into their system somehow. It's how I managed to play quite a bit with ChatGPT around the tail end of 2022 when it first came out, but these days the rate limits are so strict that I can't ever get a single message through any of the shared/trash accounts (which is probably their objective).
Won't help with friends uploading your number to WhatsApp though.
There are a million services that give you a single additional phone number, but AFAIK none that let you generate any number of completely anonymous virtual numbers that forward to your real number, like what privacy.com does. (I think there are a bunch that let you buy each additional phone number and have them each contain their own inbox and everything, but none of them really act as just free relay services like what privacy.com does.)
privacy.com also locks each number to a single merchant, allows me to instantly revoke numbers that have been compromised or that are no longer going to be used, allows me to get credit for fraudulent purchases without having to file a real chargeback (I do realize this doesn't really have a phone-number equivalent, but you get the idea), etc. absolutely invaluable protection layer.
Why there's no service generating multiple permanent virtual numbers is a mystery to me, too. They don't seem much more scarce than credit card numbers. On the other hand, only Privacy.com seems to allow issuing that many cards (in contrast, Revolut only allows you to have 5 permanent cards + 1 single use card – this seems to be the usual limit in other banks as well), so they might know some kind of a secret sauce.
I don't think there is any major residential phone provider that would offer that sort of partnership to the point where you could trick services like OpenAI into thinking that the number is that of a real person. Aaand spinning up any new phone provider for this purpose is like registering a brand new super-blockable ASN for a VPN's IP addresses.
FWIW, Telnyx allows you to keep phone numbers indefinitely, and receive/forward SMS messages and phone calls. But they do not offer an integration out of the box - you'd have to code that up yourself using their APIs. And each phone number you allocate has to be paid for individually. And also, Telnyx is super detactable and blockable, of course.
Though maybe they would move to something more invasive like ID or something... which may or may not be even rarer, but is definitely more personal.
If you're too poor (or paranoid) to have a phone number, you aren't much value as a lead. The current system qualifies that (a) you're not a bot, (b) you have money to spend, and (c) you're in a specific metro area (and not Antarctica as you claim). Self-reported location, IP and phone number can all be spoofed, but 2/3 data points aligning is close enough.
There's no incentive to onboard unvetted accounts.
But of course this still leaves the problem of people who don't even have a phone.
The vast majority of people find what you are describing to be completely impractical to the point of uselessness.
I know I should though if I want to use ig and others free of mind.
Google knows FULL WELL that the card is valid through the month but locks any payment account associated with it a month prior.
I suspect there's a lot of this going on, though I mind the phone number less. Having dealt with fraud on the other side, requiring a phone number is one of the few (mostly) universal things and costly enough to acquire enough numbers that it really helps slow down spam and fraud.
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
Are you telling me the service I've decided to sign up to defines the rules of that service?
It does seem very bait and switch.
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.
This condescending, dismissive attitude is why people tune out privacy advocates.
I am not talking about servers requiring phone numbers, I am talking about Discord blocking your account entirely for no reason until you give them a phone number. Maybe you haven't experienced it yet, but I have.
They want you on their games marketplace, and they don't want you to return the product/make a consumer complaint. Plus there aren't any bots to worry about when the cost of entry is a few hundred $.
It's no secret Instragram has an issue with bots. Meta probably wishes their VR platform had the same problem haha.
I think there was an actual person on the other end of the ticket, I don’t think the odds would be very good if someone tried it nowadays.
I've used this countless times to activate google products and other such privacy invading services.
Just happened to me with apple after I moved countries and lost my old number
I'm afraid more services will go in this direction.
HN can only use less reliable identifiers (eg GeoIP) to link my account to other data. A phone number (potentially) connects me to more data about me.
It's a very common manipulation technique where if you are a baddy, you ask someone to do a small thing that is not something they would normally do. And then keep asking them to do incrementally larger and riskier things, eventually backed by some kind of threat.
Unfortunately this one is darker because it's even more actively evil. They are claiming to suspend your account, causing you to believe you are "in trouble", a very real fear for most people, while actually doing nothing of the sort. They just want your phone number and are literally bullying you for it. They could just say, "hey, we'll need your phone number if you want to create an account with us," but they would lose some percentage of sign-ups by being honest. Which is pretty much all you need to know about that business!
The world would be a lot better place if we taught our children (and people in general) about how all kinds of manipulation techniques can be used against them.
Threads.net Can Go to Hell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37254294 - Aug 2023 (60 comments)
The cost of an email is virtually 0. The cost of a unique phone number that can receive text-messages is non-zero. This was a pain in the butt for me, as you often have to get a real phone number (they reject VoIP ones) and that takes more work to get working.
Bots and scraping is a huge issue for Instagram. Instagram really dislikes the fact that you can buy a lot of likes for very cheap, so I kinda understand why they do this.
You seem to be overlooking the bald-faced lie told by Meta/IG that someone's new account is violating "Community Guidelines" before they can even use it.
Moreover, it makes no sense that a phone number would be a "get out of jail free" card for violating Community Guidelines.
I don't know about OP, but the the article they linked had a screenshot showing that the Community Guidelines they'd violated were around "account integrity". Looking at those[1], it seems plausible that OP and the article's author used something during account creation that triggered an integrity system, similar to what the parent was describing. Maybe they used a proxy/VPN, or something else that caused the robots to think that they were "Creat(ing) an account by scripted or other inauthentic means."
I don't think that big tech deserves a free pass on much, but to think they they're suspending accounts just to harvest phone numbers seems like it would be something they'd likely get into deep shit over: stock price drop, huge fines, CEO in front of Congress-type of thing. I doubt it would be worth it to them.
1. https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/acc...
Compare my HN username to the domain name of the linked article. I am the author.
I did not use a proxy or VPN.
> to think they they're suspending accounts just to harvest phone numbers seems like it would be something they'd likely get into deep shit over: stock price drop, huge fines, CEO in front of Congress-type of thing. I doubt it would be worth it to them.
Apparently it was worth it to them:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/08/twitter-admits-it-used-two...
This is not a conspiracy theory, it's something that has actually happened.
I was quite shocked all i did was created a new account how did I ended up violating the community just by creating a new account