I’m really getting tired of this false equivalency between identity and a persons means of communication. I had another case today where a service that I’ve used for years now denies my access to that service unless I prove to them that I have the financial resources to pay a phone company every month. At some point this became the new minimum standard for participation in society.
When I was young, not every house had a private line. There was still such a thing as a Party Line were a group of neighbors would share a single subscriber line. In a single lifetime we have gone from that to the point where it is unthinkable that a person would even think of leaving their home without a cell phone in their pocket.
I asked Google how much is the average cell phone bill and got several numbers in the $120-$166 per month range. I really hope that number if factoring in the cost of the device. The bottom line is that at minimum wage, a person is having to work over two days just to stay connected. And for the most part people are not using their phones to talk. It’s time to stop forcing people to maintain talk and text services when all they need is data.
It is actually possible to just get a data plan but it’s difficult. You would get a pre-paid plan from a company line Airalo and have reliable data from anywhere int he country. I’ve been doing this for years and it works great.
It ends up being a problem when a company requires SMS as a way to prove identity. Initially it was just there to help protect your account. I have 2FA and a strong password. Adding SMS would actually make my account less protected because of the frailty of our SMS system. The real reason is not security but the ability to cross-reference your identity across myriad systems.
I got an email from Meta that I had lost access to my Instagram account because my “account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Guidelines on account integrity and authentic identity. I tried to login to my account using username, password, 2FA codes, and an additional email verification. I was prompted to provide a phone number for a text message. I have a choice. Give up my cell phone number of loose access to my Instagram. I do not see a path forward.
So what are the options?
One option is that we create a national system of public key encryption. Along with your ID you have a unique private key only known and available to you. You are able give out a public key to prove you are you who say you are. Of course we know that’s not going to happen. We can’t get Social Security and Homeland to admit that they cross-reference identifying data into a national identification number. We are seeing experiments around the world with national digital IDs with mixed results.
The more likely option is that big business will carry on in the tradition of AOL and work to identify every citizen with a credit card and a number. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple will become de facto reservoirs of identity. The companies are all incentivized to have a strong privacy stance while at the same time profiting from the aggregation of data behind the scenes.
So back to SMS. Everyone knows that SMS is unsafe and never designed as system to serve as the weakest link in our financial system. It is time to shun SMS like shag carpet and move on to pure connectivity solutions. Let’s support efforts to create digital credential systems that allow for authentication without revealing unnecessary private information.