ChatGPT

Wow. This is incredible.

Everyone complains about robo-calls and getting car warranty calls and they still keep giving out their phone number. I have yet to get any spam phone calls or texts.

Right - SMS MFA is the worst and should be avoided whenever possible. Unfortunately, most financial institutions still have not advanced to offering anything more than that.

Consider signing up for a service and using your cell phone number to register with it. Then you forget about that service and years later you need to gain access to the service but you have a new phone number. Now you're shit out of luck. It has happened to me (a lot) and it's happened to the person who had my cell number before me. This is the paranoia I suffer from - not having access to an account and the fear of the database being leaked or hacked - also something that has happened to me (thanks, TMobile). I've also had physical mail delivered to my home address for years because the phone number I currently have was used by the previous person to register with a service (DoorDash / Chewy).

No one should ever use a cell phone to register for a service. MFA is one (bad) thing, registration is another. It's foolish and it's insecure.

ChatGPT does in fact require you to register with a phone number when you sign up with either your Google / Microsoft / Apple ID. You've already logged in with an authenticated service so there's no legit reason for ChatGPT to also require your phone number to register for an account. We're talking about a platform explicitly produced and utilized to gather and store data and people are freely giving it information that can be used to authenticate their online persona.

I get that this whole thing is about giving our decision making abilities to a computer but maybe we should all take a little bit of a pause to use their own grey matter to consider the ramifications of our actions before diving in headfirst at warp speed.