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> No, most people have a phone number and for most people that's their own phone number. That was a tradeoff for them.

That’s a very first world observation, and even there, this would be quite shaky if actual numbers were known.

Also, I didn’t say or intend to mean that these companies made excluding people a goal. Their decisions, on the contrary, have resulted in that.



I'd argue that it's a reasonable tradeoff if you consider the users vs customers distinction. Many (most?) services want more users because they're either going to pay money directly or they are good targets for advertising. A first world user is valuable, a third world user - not so much (literally - if you look at costs for clickthroughs or user acquisition or ad revenue per user, there's easily a hundredfold difference). People who are poor enough to not have a phone of their own are probably not going to bring you much revenue, so it's no big deal if they can't access your service. I mean, a company isn't building that service to serve users, it's building that service only to earn money from these users.




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