I personally am fine with this.
But you can only enable it, after you give them your phone number.
Also, apparently years of subscribing to channels is not as verified as giving them your phone number. They should just say “We really want your phone number and don’t give a shit about anything else”.
true. But I think that’s mostly to make bots harder to create. Not as easy to get a phone number than an email address
A convenient scapegoat for getting your PII so they can sell your data at a higher value.
Subscribing is more expensive than getting a phone number in most places. Hell, even in expensive Germany, a phone number is only about 2 months of subscribing.
I had a lot of success with this: https://phonegenerator.net/
Before I deleted my accounts there, I remember twitter and facebook deactivated your account for “suspicious activity” if you did not provide a phone number when making it, and the only way to reactivate it was to give them your phone number.