> Honestly if companies started realizing this they might stop requiring them. A lot of people don't even have a phone number.
If you're too poor (or paranoid) to have a phone number, you aren't much value as a lead. The current system qualifies that (a) you're not a bot, (b) you have money to spend, and (c) you're in a specific metro area (and not Antarctica as you claim). Self-reported location, IP and phone number can all be spoofed, but 2/3 data points aligning is close enough.
There's no incentive to onboard unvetted accounts.
To clarify my point: there are enough phone numbers for all people to have a few. There are not enough phone numbers for the combinatorial explosion of every person-to-person pair having a unique phone number.
Maybe there should be. I personally would love to usher in a digital age where you can only call someone by a passkey unique to you, and it's normal/easy to generate these and transfer them over to people/services that need them.
But of course this still leaves the problem of people who don't even have a phone.
The POTS (plain old telephone system) is explicitly designed for discoverability. They used to physically throw a book that mapped numbers to names and addresses on your doorstep for free, and chained the same directory to every public telephone. Fighting against a fundamental design goal of a system is a fool’s errand. The features you are looking for can be easily accomplished over the internet, and they smell very similar to PGP and also feel pretty adjacent to Signal/WhatsApp with some variation. Heck if we’re limiting it to off the shelf consumer solutions, FaceTime with custom email domains matches the description if you squint hard enough.
The vast majority of people find what you are describing to be completely impractical to the point of uselessness.
