Telegram Offers Premium Subscription in Exchange for Using Your Number to Send OTPs
In June 2017, the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) released a survey involving over 3,000 students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which revealed that 98% of them would be prepared to exchange free pizza for the email addresses of their friends.
The study found that although people claim to care about privacy, they are nevertheless quite eager to give up personal information when given a reason to do so—a phenomenon known as the privacy paradox.
Currently, almost seven years later, Telegram has unveiled a new feature that offers some users a complimentary premium membership in return for letting the well-known messaging app use their phone numbers to pass along one-time passwords (OTPs) to other users who try to log in.
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