Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
It’s Getting Harder to Do Anything on the Web That Doesn’t Demand Personal Identification. E-Mail, Included.
The Surveillance State wants to know everything people are saying to each other and it wants to know who is saying those things.
I noticed that the list of E-Mail providers that doesn’t immediately pop up and demand a phone number, which can be linked back to you, has fallen off a cliff.
Most also seem to be blacklisting burner phone number apps.
I’ve got a wide variety of E-Mail accounts set up across at least ten different E-Mail sites.
Why? Because it’s hard to tell when or if one will “go bad” and start demanding my phone number, like Discord would.
Ironically, Microsoft Outlook is one of the ones left that doesn’t have a hard demand for a phone number right away. So you can set up an account. But then the next time you log into it, it says a phone number, for “recovery purposes”, will be required within the next seven days.
This loophole means you can set up a throwaway and then use it as a “recovery email” to set up accounts at Vivaldi Mail and Proton Mail, and GMX. Then once the Outlook account demands a phone number, you just let Microsoft go ah ..
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