Does Instagram suspend accounts just to get their phone numbers?
I registered for an Instagram account today. Immediately after I signed in for the first time, I was suspended due to violating the Community Guidelines. I appealed, which they require a phone number to do so. After verifying my phone number, I was immediately redirected to an unsuspended page. "We reviewed your account and found that it does follow our Community Guidelines." It happened too fast for a human to have been involved. I've heard of this happening recently to other people as well[1].
Is this a required flow in order to siphon phone numbers from new accounts without making it "required" on the sign up page?
1: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/8/4.html
I presume any large tech company will ask for my number, at least, at some stage. This is why I have a number on standby in-case that happens, and this is not my main phone number. I have a separate number for Big Tech™, and another private one for giving out to friends & family that I don't attach to any online service.
Twitter/Shitter has been doing this for ages. It's a common practice.
This happened recently to me, too. It was a jarring experience to sign up for a service and then have that service immediately suspend me. It's like the opposite of that trend where the service would display balloons and stuff upon successful sign-up.
They don't care about what policy you violate. They want to force you to give away PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to put in their databases in exchange for access to a "free" account. Which is more important to you, your privacy or access to a glorified photo gallery app with commenting? I choose my privacy.
Similarly, does Google suspend payment accounts to get your driver's license photo?
Google knows FULL WELL that the card is valid through the month but locks any payment account associated with it a month prior.
I suspect there's a lot of this going on, though I mind the phone number less. Having dealt with fraud on the other side, requiring a phone number is one of the few (mostly) universal things and costly enough to acquire enough numbers that it really helps slow down spam and fraud.
I have never had an Instagram account but decided to make one while I was traveling. The second I finished signing up, I got a notification saying I violated community guidelines and the only way to get my account unbanned was to share my phone number. I uninstalled the app immediately.
If you're in Europe, just get one of those pre-paid free SIM cards (you don't even have to top up nor activate the card using KYC). You simply have to text a number they give you and you will get an active phone no for 14 days.
I've used this countless times to activate google products and other such privacy invading services.
The benevolent interpretation is that they are doing it to fight scraping and fake followers. The prompt you get for suspected scraping or botting is along the lines of "complete an SMS 2FA challenge within 24 hours or be banned forever", but maybe the first step when you don't have a phone number connected looks like what you experienced.
I've had the same experience with Twitter: immediately after I sign up a new account (e. g. for a project or something) it get blocked for “suspicious activity”, and I get a prompt to verify a phone number to unblock it.
This has been my experience as well. If I use proton mail, I always have to provide a phone number. This is a new norm, be it IG, Twitter, etc.
Facebook/Instagram seem to have higher standards for minimum required jockiness to be considered human, and that posed a bit of problem when they launched VR headset, but most social media today do that.
Same with Twitter. That's why I don't use it.
Yes. Twitter and Discord do this as well, it's basically an industry standard at this point.
Same experience. I like to give the benefit of doubt but I don’t think so in this case. Dark patterns like this will continue until it is codified into law ones right to have personal information deleted. Even then I assume it would be too late and you never truly have your data removed.
This is a standard dark pattern user manipulation technique. It's a continuation of the trend where techbro-run companies make it LOOK like creating an account will be easy and take seconds. But every time you step forward, there is one more hoop to jump through.
This is a very common manipulation technique where if you are a baddy, you ask someone to do a small thing that is not something they would normally do. And then keep asking them to do incrementally larger and riskier things, eventually backed by some kind of threat.
Unfortunately this one is darker because it's even more actively evil. They are claiming to suspend your account, causing you to believe you are "in trouble", a very real fear for most people, while actually doing nothing of the sort. They just want your phone number and are literally bullying you for it. They could just say, "hey, we'll need your phone number if you want to create an account with us," but they would lose some percentage of sign-ups by being honest. Which is pretty much all you need to know about that business!
The world would be a lot better place if we taught our children (and people in general) about how all kinds of manipulation techniques can be used against them.
While I'd love to attribute this to data harvesting and don't love Meta as a company, as someone who has tried to scrape Instagram in the past (to get recent images users have posted at specific restaurants), I believe this is a reasonable measure to increase the cost of new spam accounts.
The cost of an email is virtually 0. The cost of a unique phone number that can receive text-messages is non-zero. This was a pain in the butt for me, as you often have to get a real phone number (they reject VoIP ones) and that takes more work to get working.
My experience as well. I can think of 2 reasons:
1. Phone number can be matched with off-market data sale of transactions
2. Emails have filters to auto-delete marketing emails, text messages still do not have a parallel.
It's always surprising to see how willing people are to give up their phone number to use an app. It's not just Meta products. Telegram & ChatGPT too.
I'm afraid more services will go in this direction.
Tangential: I’ve recently tried to change my profile picture in Uber and it turned out I can’t - they’re asking me to schedule an appointment at their shop. Out of curiosity I checked - the closest one is exactly 84 kilometers from where I live. Nope, won’t happen. Things are crazy nowadays.
I signed into Instagram because one of the news sites referenced it. A few months later I signed on again to set up a business account, only to be informed I was "violating the Community Guidelines" and asking to send a text (so I gave a number intended for the business - only for the text to ask me to bend over, kiss the nether parts, and, oh yes, write a number on a piece of paper and take a selfie for them. So far, Zinc is asking for photos. So I wrote Meta's chief legal officer to ask for a justification for mining for personal identification information under fraudulent circumstances. No answer yet so it's time to go see if I can get triple damages for not responding to the demand letter. Ho Hum, we hardly knew ye.
That happened to me as well as I created a new account like 3 days ago.
I was quite shocked all i did was created a new account how did I ended up violating the community just by creating a new account
Hasn't happened to me, it's not linked to a real FB account either.