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> I also think you should be able to get a phone number without ID at all, which would preclude verification in those cases.

While I agree with you, this is already not the case in much of Europe where an ID is required to obtain a sim card.



Whenever I go to mobile provider in Serbia to do anything related to account I have to provide government ID. They even put it in card reader to get relevant data. While SIM swap is certainly a theoretical risk, it's not a practical one around here. Having authentication on a phone or another physical device (without backup) seems to be at least two orders of magnitude higher risk of losing access to everything. Relying to Google or another third party for authentication is not without its risks too.

I just hope SMS authentication won't go away completely for other parts of world where risk balance is different than in USA. Until things change, I trust more my local birocracy to work their birocratic ways and always check ID where needed then I would trust myself not to lose some auth device.




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