It's a phone number. It's probably been bought / sold a few times already.
Unless you're on the level of Edward Snowden, I wouldn't worry about it. But maybe your sense of privacy is more valuable than the outcome you'd get from Claude. That's fine too.
It's my phone number... linked to my Google identity... linked to every submitted user prompt... linked to my source code.
There's also been a spate of AI companies rushing to release products and having "oops" moments where they leaked customer chats or whatever.
They're not run like a FAANG, they don't have the same security pedigree, and they generally don't have any real guarantee of privacy.
So yes, my privacy is more valuable.
Conversely: Why is my non-privacy so valuable to Anthropic? Do they plan on selling my data? Maybe not now... but when funding gets a bit tight? Do they plan on selling my information to the likes of Cambridge Analytica? Not just superficial metadata, but also an AI-summarised history of my questions?
The best thing to do would be not to ask. But they are asking.
It's an anti abuse method. A valid phone number will always have a cost for spammers/multi accounters to obtain in mass, but will have no cost for the desired user base (the assumption is that every worthwhile user already has a phone).
Captchas are trivially broken and you can get access to millions of residential IP addresses, but phone numbers (especially if you filter out VOIP providers) still have a cost.
I hope you don't delete it! I enjoyed reading it. It pleased my confirmation bias, anyways.
Your comment might help someone notice patterns that they've been glancing over....
I liked it up until the T&S part. My eyes glazed over the rest since I didn't know what T&S means. But that's just me.
cool personal site. nice & to the point. Yea, I thought you would have gotten used to seeing elements of yourself on the web, but I guess there's levels to notoriety.
Can you please explain why it would be preferable to have large companies paying x cents per notification to Apple, and not to users?
I don't understand the credit part? Wouldn't some kind of "set your rate" option for the user, allow more individual flexibility? As opposed to a flat fee per notif, sent to Apple?
The product isn't necessarily true (mobile -> landline push), but the profit-seeking is certainly expected, as it is for all businesses.
While the amount of minutes & attentions that are generated from spam calls helps the telcos, because they get paid either way... that doesn't mean they're negligent.
They just don't have the right tools to police this since they're common carriers. Things are changing little by little and with upcoming changes in telco infrastructure, I expect Q4 this year to show a strong signal of what the future holds.
Can they not just monitor the statistics from an incoming <insert phone system collective noun here> and notice that they're randomly calling millions of numbers per small unit of time and swapping their caller id for every one of them... and then just block them?
Is there a legal reason they can't? Is it a liability reason?
What's really getting my goat the last year is the scam center pretending to be Comcast / XFinity / AT&T / Spectrum offering to lower my bills. They constantly rotate through the four companies and often also have my name, stolen from one of those provider's databases.
I've stopped calling them scammers on the phone and call them thieves, or "chor" in Hindi. Often they hangup immediately, but 1 in 10 or so get sheepish and embarrassed.
