We just keep adding garbage, de facto endpoints to identifying yourself online, and it ends in you needing to use a burner number to get a Gmail address so you can use it to sign up for Skype/Discord/whateverthehell so you can etc etc etc.
Oh and SMS is going to be your 2FA for most stuff, too, so get ready for... more burners obscured by pay-as-you-go SIMs, if you don't want to be hilariously identifiable and subject to your stuff being ransacked after some basic social engineering. ("Hello, this is [target], I lost my phone and need the SIM reset. Thanks, yes, I can hold...")
Hey guess what the feds consider suspicious behavior. Hint: it's buying a fistful of SIMs and a cheapjack flip phone on Amazon.
So the logical extrapolation of our collective inability to do anything but awkwardly jam more improvised identification systems onto the internet is that you can choose between being easy to stalk, individually or by corporations, or just take your info/opsec cues from the drug kingpins in The Wire.
We just endlessly coast on what's free at the moment (used to be Gmail, now it's however you can fool Google into thinking it has your phone number) until that door shuts, one more link in the chain gets clamped on, and the cycle beings again. Argh.
@Zero_Democracy yeah.. I'm trying to escape stuff like this right now and it's super frustrating how everything just ends up linking back to one place - one point of failure - and that point is usually controlled by a coorporation who sells your data
@lizardsquid My best advice (at least in the US) right now is to buy a pay-as-you-go SIM and a cheap phone that you keep turned off in a drawer, *only* as a credentials endpoint. Costs like $4-10/month but them's the breaks.