Personal information and ads on Twitter
Virtually the entire security industry agrees that using phone numbers for account security is an antipattern because of sim-jacking, and yet swaths of the biggest tech companies in the industry do it anyway.<p>I recently got locked out of my Amazon account because I made a large purchase after not ordering anything for ~6-7 months. During the reset process, they tried really hard to get me to set a phone number &#x27;for account security&#x27;. From what I could tell from their documentation, it&#x27;s not even just used for 2FA, it&#x27;s literally just a way to prove my identity if I need to reset my password.<p>I refused, and then a few days later Amazon called me up to reconfirm the order anyway, even though I had never given them my number. Their entire account recovery process from that point on was based on me having access to information that was already listed on my account, that the hacker would have 100% had access to. It was all just security theater, literally the only thing that mattered was I had access to my email and a phone number.<p>Fastmail (to its credit) allows you to have 2FA without a recovery number, but it requires you to add a recovery number, activate a real 2FA app, and then delete the number. At least it doesn&#x27;t (as far as I know) use the number on its own for account recovery.<p>Twitter&#x27;s <i>CEO</i> got hacked because Twitter trusted phone numbers as identity, and they <i>still</i> haven&#x27;t changed the policy, because collecting phone numbers is fun or something.<p>In theory, a 2FA over SMS is better than nothing. In practice, it trains customers to be insecure and should be avoided. It trains customers to think that identity verification over text is OK. In practice, you can&#x27;t trust companies not to use it for advertising, or to start using it as identity verification in the future. In practice, there are very, very few legitimate reasons why a company should ever need my phone number, and pretty much none of them have anything to do with security. 99% of your users should be using a 2FA app instead of a phone number.<p>Companies like Twitter should be shamed for misusing security information this way, but they should also be shamed for using insecure authentication methods. I&#x27;m convinced that 5 years from now, we&#x27;re going to look back at SMS authentication the same way we looked at serving login pages over HTTP.