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Yes, it is providing an excellent security benefit -- that from here on out the account will be protected by association to an additional factor.
Obviously it's not retroactively possible to add that as a factor for this specific login. But that doesn't mean it's of no benefit.
You have as much information as a well-motivated attacker might have. In fact, you went to great efforts to make yourself so uncorrelated with the original login, that you are indistinguishable from an attacker.
On some level, sure, this is a failure of the technology to have more factors that the real count has that an attacker wouldn't (although see above -- you got mad when they tried to add more factors)
Please, I don't want to look like abuse but I'm going to do everything I can to look like abuse!
Obviously. You made the account just to get past various other registrations. Of course that's gonna flag you.
Think of the alternative: if ProtonMail (or whoever) allowed this shit, then Discord (et al) wouldn't accept a ProtonMail account as a verification.
No, they don't scan. Discord and others explicitly insert metadata into the email header saying "this is a service registration request, please ensure that only established accounts can read it". No scanning necessary, because Discord actively tags it. You can read it yourself in the SMTP headers.
This is maybe understandable, but at the same time this is niche-of-a-niche kind of user behavior.
The social question of whether the systems that we put in place need to accommodate the needs of tiny minorities of people rather than being aligned to the larger majorities is well trod.
Privacy is incompatible with Gattaca's "Valid world" or Shadowrun's SIN. If we still believe it's a right - as it has been for most of history and is official policy in most Western countries - SINs as a prerequisite of existing in society can't be allowed. If we don't, we should go the whole hog, abandoning all restrictions on government surveillance (there is a lot more social good in police surveillance than corporate surveillance!), ripping out the "three felonies a day" from the criminal code*, and possibly going the full Geodesica-Bedlam route of "privacy is against the law; everyone gets to access the telescreen cameras and run spy drones".
*Laws that everyone breaks + no privacy = police state, since everyone is always provably guilty and thus prosecutorial discretion is ultimate power. And, indeed, we're sliding in that direction at the moment.
What about zero knowledge proofs?
What is to be zero-knowledge proven?
The current ideas around the application of the technology are precisely that you could use it to build a digital identity system that still retains privacy.
The usual example involves medical records: instead of having some centralized authority store all of your information and reveal select parts of it to people of interest, which has the properties you decry, you could hold this information encrypted (and even public to some degree) and require the signature of the individual to verify any property of this shared encrypted data without ever even exposing the data itself.
You could have your pharmacy check that a doctor prescribed a particular drug to you without knowing what your illness is, who the doctor is or any other information about you and none of that information be handled in the clear by any state authority.
Whether it's realistic that such a system would be made is another question, but the raw technical impossibility you speak of is, at least, being questioned right now.
OP's usecase doesn't seem amenable to zero-knowledge-proof, though; you could certainly prove that you have access to a SIN, but everyone has such access (including spammers) so there's not much point.
Maybe i'm being too literal, but SR SINs are specifically about what social categories you're part of in the RPG, not mere individual identification.
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That assumes that the phone number is there for security. It's actually there so that Google can collect information about you and correlate it with other information about you that uses the phone number. The claim that it's there for security is a lie.
Why would it not just be both? They make money on it and it also improves security for most people most of the time. They're willing to take the hit of angering a few weirdos that want to spoof and aren't actually doing anything sketchy if it makes them money and improves the user experience for people that don't care to hide their location or identity. Being able to correctly identify the owner of the account seems like an almost perfect alignment of interests between security and profit.
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Seconded and endorsed across the board.
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