The saddest thing is that many HN readers (and the tech community in general) have been instrumental in privacy's demise.

Despite paying lip service to privacy, many people here still work on privacy-eroding companies and services.

How many people here work Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or LinkedIn, Palantir, etc... (not to mention less well-known names that still erode privacy).. probably a lot.

Many founders (another group heavily represented on HN) are just after their pot of gold at the end of the IPO, and will gleefully walk over as many users' backs as it takes.

In some ways worse, though, are the people who are intimately familiar with technology, and who are enabling the people at the top. These people all have a choice of who to work for and what to do. No one's holding a gun to their head making them work on tracking and spyware and user-disempowerment, and yet they do.

It's frustrating for sure but the reason that they want a phone number is because it's an excellent key to join lots of independent records about you. The companies who ask for your phone number don't care if the phone company knows where you live. They don't even need to ask the phone company, all they have to do is join up with a vendor who you did disclose your address to.

You can at least do yourself a mild favor and don't tell your phone number to all those brick n mortar companies who ask for it. "we'll never call you" -- of course they don't, they just want your individual identity to track you.

I've tried several privacy apps where you can set up phone numbers not attached to your identity and google refused to let me use any of them.

Thats a bad idea I think, if you get locked out of your gmail account, you might not be able to get a reset code on your GV number either.

Took about 5 for me.

Took me a day