There’s some incredible insight here.

On top of that, phone numbers in many countries are also unique logins to a number of services (again, here in China you need it for literally everything, it’s THE number one digital footprint)

This is one reason I particularly dislike companies that require phone number “verification” either immediately when registering, or sometime after. Services like Microsoft, Twitter, Discord, Facebook, all find a reason to request it at some point. And that request often seems to be related to whether or not they can pin down your actual identity or not…