Your phone numbers are absolutely not for sale and they never will be. In addition, there are many other ways to create a Steem account without providing your phone number one of which is mentioned in this very article: anonsteem. The reason your phone number is required is because everyone who joins steemit.com receives delegated steem power from Steemit and therefore the approval system requires additional information to guarantee that those requesting accounts are not attempting to defraud the system. Other social networks don't ask for phone numbers because they don't care about whether or not accounts are genuine. That just doesn't work for any application that is going to use Steem Power delegation to enable users to create Steem accounts for free.
Community Liaison, Steemit
Below is from the FAQ page.
Am I allowed to create more than one account?
Each user is allowed only one paid-for account created via Steemit.com, however users are allowed to create multiple accounts on the blockchain. Creating additional accounts on the blockchain requires users to pay their own account creation fee for any additional accounts.
What are other ways to create an account on the blockchain besides using Steemit.com?
If you are willing to pay your own signup fee, then there are other ways to create a new account on the blockchain.
There is a third-party tool called AnonSteem that accepts bitcoin, Litecoin, STEEM, or SBD to anonymously create a Steem account. You do not need to have an existing Steem blockchain account to use the service, but there is a charge on top of the blockchain account creation fee for using the service.
There is also a third-party tool called SteemConnect that allows you to create accounts by paying or delegating the account creation fee. There is no additional fee to use the service, but does require an existing Steem blockchain account to pay the account creation fee to create the account.
Why do I need to provide my email and phone number?
To create an account on the blockchain, it costs STEEM tokens. When you create an account through Steemit.com, Steemit Inc. is supplying the tokens to pay the account creation fee. In order to prevent users from abusing the paid-for signup and creating multiple accounts, we need to be able to verify that each user is only signing up for one account.
Who are they paying the account creation fee and there are other ways to verify accounts. selling our details is not the only problem, they can also give fed our details if the are pressurized.
@Andrarchy! Thanks for clearing that up - you just answered the question I was about to ask
Your videos are awesome, btw. Respect!
Hi @andrarchy, I think the efforts Steemit goes to to verify everyone is a real user are great.
(I always had my suspicions when we placed Facebook ads at work that half of facebook's ad traffic was their own fake users.) Having said that, because Steemit does require everyone's phone numbers to verify our accounts is there therefore ever going to be a plan to offer Steemit users who want to opt in the option of having Two Factor Verification?
I know a lot of people want to use Steemit anonymously and that shouldn't be changed for people who want to remain off the radar, but there are a lot of us who also would prefer the security of two factor verification.
Basically all my bank accounts, my facebook, my ISP etc. all offer it and it does help protect against identity and account theft. I was really concerned this week by what happened to @samstonehill. I know Steemit did him a solid and got back his account, but in his example he's a Steemian in his own name anyway, it is his face on his videos and he uses his real identity.
So for those Steemians who aren't so concerned about staying anonymous for whatever reason, wouldn't two factor verification be something that could be offered to help protect our accounts if we wanted to opt into it? It would be a re-assurance for people who want to use Steemit creatively as a blogging platform. A lot of us aren't crypto or security experts, so it would be heartbreaking to put a year or two into building up a Steemit profile and gain lots of followers only to then have some hacker basically steal all of that work and effort.
What is your idea for a second factor? Google Authenticator, SMS, Yubikey?
I think a choice of all of the above would be good. I like SMS verification myself.