(having no insider info:) Because it can be used as a primary key ID across aggregated marketing databases including your voting history / party affiliation, income levels, personality and risk profiles etc etc etc. If a company wants to, and your data hygiene hasn't been tip top, your phone number is a pointer to a ton of intimate if not confidential data. Twitter was fined $150 million for asking for phone numbers under pretense of "protecting your account" or whatever but they actually used it for ad targeting.
>> Wednesday's 9th Circuit decision grew out of revelations that between 2013 and 2019, X mistakenly incorporated users' email addresses and phone numbers into an ad platform that allows companies to use their own marketing lists to target ads on the social platform.
>> In 2022, the Federal Trade Commission fined X $150 million over the privacy gaffe.
>> That same year, Washington resident Glen Morgan brought a class-action complaint against the company. He alleged that the ad-targeting glitch violated a Washington law prohibiting anyone from using “fraudulent, deceptive, or false means” to obtain telephone records of state residents.
>> X urged Dimke to dismiss Morgan's complaint for several reasons. Among other arguments, the company argued merely obtaining a user's phone number from him or her doesn't violate the state pretexting law, which refers to telephone “records.”
>> “If the legislature meant for 'telephone record' to include something as basic as the user’s own number, it surely would have said as much,” X argued in a written motion.
Tangential: please do not use a phone number as a PK. Aside from the nightmare of normalizing them, there is zero guarantee that someone will keep the same number.
Also fun fact, people mistype and mistranscribe data. Some people even... put down fake phone numbers because they don't want to be tracked!
I would think in a world where we constantly get spam calls and texts that people would understand that a phone number is not a good PKI. I mean we literally don't answer calls from unknown numbers because of this. How is it that we can only look at these things in one direction but not the other?
OpenAI doesn’t (currently) sell ads. I really cannot see a world where they’re wanting to sell ads to their API users only? It’s not like you need a phone number to use ChatGPT.
To me the obvious example is fraud/abuse protection.
You're thinking ads are to advertise products. Ads are to modify behavior to make you more likely to buy products.
ChatGPT has the capacity to modify behavior more subtly than any advertising ever devised. Aggregating knowledge on the person on the other end of the line is key in knowing how to nudge them toward the target behavior. (Note this target behavior may be how to vote in an election, or how to feel about various hot topics.)
> Aggregating knowledge on the person on the other end of the line is key in knowing how to nudge them toward the target behavior.
It also, as Google learned, enables you to increase your revenue per placement. Advertisers will pay more for placement with their desired audience.
> It’s not like you need a phone number to use ChatGPT.
I’m pretty sure you do. Claude too. The only chatbot company I’ve made an account with is Mistral specifically because a phone number was not a registration requirement.
> It’s not like you need a phone number to use ChatGPT.
When I signed up I had to do exactly that.
> To me the obvious example is fraud/abuse protection.
Seriously. How can the most prolific means of spam be used to prevent fraud and abuse? (Okay, maybe email is a little more prolific?) Like have you never received a spam call or text? Obviously fraudsters and abusers know how to exploit those systems... it can't be more obvious...
It costs money to get a phone number. It’s about friction, not elimination.
What would you do instead?
I'm saying it clearly isn't enough friction. It's not worth the privacy cost. Which let's be real, those numbers are then commonly sold to those same spammers, even if indirectly.
You are also forgetting it is easy to mask, obscure, and hijack numbers. So it doesn't cost money per number, many times they can use their own number.
There isn't a universal solution, which is the main problem here. Sometimes numbers make sense, most of the time not.
Ok so you don’t like phone numbers. I get it.
But you’re OpenAI. You need to do _something_. What do you do?
What are they trying to prevent again? Requiring a phone number is one kind of friction for free services like twitter, but this is a service where a user registers a credit card and authorizes charges, they have the legal name of the person paying for a service, what's the phone number for? It's not like OpenAI gives me their phone number so I can call when I'm having an issue.
lol dude, they already have my credit card. Look back at the OP. You're arguing that a phone number costs money so pushes people out. You know what else costs money?...
Stop doing things just because others do it. You'll never find a better way if you're always following. You'll never find better ways if you just accept things as they are. If you never push back. Let's be real, the number isn't about identity verification. They have my name and credit card. Unless by "verification" you mean cross matching me with other databases with the intent to sell that information.
You keep pestering me but you won't ask why they need that data. Like you just accept things at face value?
The fact they don't sell ads doesn't mean they are not in the business of selling users data to third parties.
Also Netflix wasn't initially selling ads and there you have after increasing the price of their plans drastically in the last few years the ad supported subscription is probably the #1 plans because most people aren't willing to shed 15 to 25usd/€ every month to watch content that is already littered with ads.
If you sell ads you're actually incentivised not to sell data because then your competitors would be able to reach your users without paying you
You're incentivized not to sell targeting data, but you're very incentivized to collect and maintain as much of it as you can, and then offer access using it as a service.
So, at the end of your day, company X has an overdetailed profile of you, rather than each advertiser. (And also, at least in the US, can repackage and sell that data into various products if it chooses)
They don’t need to. It’s totally sufficient that they can correlate your chat history with your identity. That makes other identifiers more valuable, if they can extract your interests
The typical use case of an API is not that you personally use it. I have hundreds of clients all go through my API key, and in most cases they themselves are companies who have n clients.
It’s a good conspiracy theory, but of course it’s scoped to only ChatGPT users who are also developers and using specifically the o3 model via API. So if it is a conspiracy, it’s a fairly non-ambitious one.
They may not sell ads.
They may still buy data from ad companies and store credit cards, etc.
Many of them link users based on phone number.