I don't know why you're worried about being tracked. Just leave the cell phone at home (or in the office). You've been living without a mobile phone all these years, so just treat the mobile as if it was not mobile. Power it off when you don't need it. No power = no tracking.
Mostly true, except if I am in Dallas and I need it to set up a Twitter account, then they know I'm in Dallas, and then when I travel to Chicago on business and I need to set up another account, they will know I'm in Chicago.
(It is amazing the effort it take to stay out of the microscope's eye!)
I have to assume that you're not so far off the grid that the government doesn't already know where you live.
If it weren't for my credit card use, I'm not sure anyone would really know where I am...
You're expending all this energy to obtain a Twitter account that you consider to be a business necessity. There is such a thing as "cost of doing business." Forget about how much you save by not having a mobile/landline - consider how much more you may earn by having one. If the numbers don't add up, then by all means, forget about that Twitter account. But if it'll be profitable (even if it would be more profitable if you didn't have to pay for that phone service), then don't worry about the money.
Very true. And my fretting about costs show that I am not a "real" business yet.
With cellular comes SMS, which is why organizations like Twitter adopt SMS-based verification methods.
Good solutions are flexible. It would be nice if they'd give people a 2nd way to authenticate (e.g. voice code) like Google does for 2FA. Obviously Twitter isn't losing sleep over this, but justs aying...
From a security standpoint... As a cellular phone number is unique to a single piece of equipment, physical access to that phone number is a highly-reliable method of validating identity. By comparison, personal information/passwords/answers to security questions, etc., once obtained, can be shared, sold, and otherwise distributed widely.
But my VOIP is unique to me as well. So is my trademark. My EIN. My business filing. Etc.
Maybe scammers often use VOIP. But a scammer won't have the other credentials that I do have to back them up. So why not give me credit for that?
Apparently Twitter will trust a burner phone paid with cash - still untested on my part - but they won't trust an incorporated and lisetd business. How "secure" is that?
Do not use a "burner" - For identity validation purposes, you want to maintain control of that phone number. People who change their cellular numbers when they switch to another phone provider often have a mess of problems switching all the accounts and services that depend on phone numbers for ID validation from the old number to the new. Further, phone numbers are re-used, so if you relinquish a number, some years down the line someone else will have it.
I actually spent the afternoon researching this. Thought I had the perfect find, until the sales kid said in the final moments, "Oh, no, that price is PER MONTH..."
But later I did find a place where I can get a phone # for $40/year but the catch there is that you have to wait until the 3-month plan expires before you can renew, and if you want anonymity, you'd have to buy the plan in a store, and their nearest store to me is like 250 miles away. So that isn't practical in my case.
To your earlier point, time is money...
Organizations like Twitter have a vested interest in reaching as many users as possible, but they are under no obligation to reach every person who wants to use the service. It's a business, and just as you don't want to pay for a landline/cell service, they are justified in deciding just how much expense they will incur in order to reach every single person on Earth.
And that certainly applies in my case!
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