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Thought experiment: What if Elon Musk is ensuring that Twitter fails on purpose? What would be the benefit?

A couple weeks ago, I signed up for Sendgrid to take advantage of their free email service. I always provide as little information as possible when signing up for new services, and I try my best to avoid providing my phone number. Luckily, I was able to get everything set up and maintain some level of privacy doing so.

Fast-forward a couple weeks: I go to log in to change one of my templates, and I get prompted to enable 2FA on my account. Thinking, “it’s kinda neat they make it this easy,” I click “Next”. Then, Sendgrid prompts me to enter my phone number so that in case I lose access to my 2FA device, they can send me a one-time code via SMS…

In other words, SMS can be used to bypass the 2FA you set up with Sendgrid. After going back and forth with their customer support team, it looks like providing your number is the only way to enable 2FA and unless you enable 2FA you can not log into your account…

On numerous occasions these services have proven to be unreliable stewards of people’s most private data. How come we haven’t tried to disband them?