Confirming Your Account

Phish.net strives to be a responsible part of the Phish community. In doing so, we have to address a few challenges.

1. First and foremost is security. We take the responsibility of protecting your personal information seriously. Currently, we have no way to validate a user who loses access to their email of record if they cannot login. We want to make sure that we have multiple ways to validate who you are and ensure that your information is safe. Along with this, in time, we will introduce optional two-factor authentication.
2. Second is protection. Fortunately, our community is vibrant, colorful, and diverse! Unfortunately, that diversity brings different levels of maturity and intent. Consequently, our community has a very small, but very loud, subset of troublemakers who either troll our site or, in fringe cases, believe they are being unfairly targeted by our volunteers. In some cases, these volunteers don't even interact with our users, but actually have been threatened. In other cases, the mission of our site and charitable foundation have been threatened. Account confirmation is the first of several steps towards limiting site participation to users who have a confirmed phone number on record. We believe that removing a perceived protection of anonymity is the best first defense against some of the misogynistic, offensive, violent, or threatening things that we've had to work to remove.
3. Last, duplicate accounts. A phone number can only be tied to one account. Once a phone number is confirmed, it will be locked in until that user changes the number. This will help us keep our systems lean and allow us to build a web of trusted accounts.

We will not now, nor will we ever, share your phone number with a third party.

Here is a complete list of how we may use your phone number:

• To text you an account confirmation code
• If you opt in, for two factor authentication to increase account security
• If you opt in, for granular notifications (e.g. private messages, forum responses, subject to your settings & preferences)
• To contact you by phone if we believe your account was compromised
• To contact you by phone if we believe there is any concern for your safety
• To contact you by phone to reinstate your account if it is suspended, and you request a call
• To contact you by phone to re-authorize your account if there is abuse and you want to continue to use the site