Comments by "" (@MsHojat) on "2 Factor Authentication: How to Counter its Abuse by Big Tech" video.

  1. With regards to 2FA numbers, most major services in my experience DO NOT ACCEPT VOIP numbers, so it's not a viable option. With regards to Google or Google Voice specifically, I think I heard that they did allow it, but that was a while back and may have changed. My suggestion for 2FA numbers is to get a pay-per-use plan. Mine is something ridiculously expensive like 20 cents per SMS text to send ($.60 per MMS), 40 cents per minute to talk (even for receiving calls), but receiving texts are free, which means the overall cost is only the required 1/3-year top-up fee of 25$ (75$ per year, 6.25 per month), and that money goes toward talk/text/data. Granted the rates are high so you can burn through it quickly. surprisingly the data rate is only $0.15 per MB (which is cheap for pay-per-use in Canada, despite it still being stupid expensive overall), so with a firewall installed on my phone, and lean data use, I can use it for some basic data stuff too. VOIP service (even when including paid VOIP service fees) even works out to be much cheaper than the .40 per minute; more like $.10–.15 per minute As mentioned this is for Canada. It should be even cheaper in the USA, and super cheap in most of Europe and Asia. (mobile consumers are being exploited in Canada) What's nice about these sort of plans is that you can set up the account without having to give name/address/credit-card (or at least fake name works), and you can top-up the account with purchased cards at stores which can be paid with cash. This allows for complete anonymity (although really unnecessary, at least for only a 2FA plan).
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  2. What pisses me off is that Facebook is being bitched at and distrusted by everyone when they really never sold any info of users to anyone. In the mean time Twitter is literally selling personal info such as phone numbers and everyone still uses it and doesn't complain about it's data exploitation (although there is a lot of talk about the quality of user content). Such terrible double standards and/or ignorance when it comes to much of the major apps and services. I'm not suggesting that Facebook had good privacy practices, but just that so much about them is overblown by the less tech/privacy-savvy people, and is often the users' fault in the first place (for enabling "find friends by phone number" and posting all sorts of content publicly (or even friends of friends) but having expectations of privacy from it).
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