This is a measure designed to help us prevent facial recognition companies from gaining programmatic access to our api to test against it. In addition, because we are a new startup with limited computer resources such testing could also harm our throughput capabilities for actual users. Unfortunately, there are far better sources of simple name and phone number data such as whitepages.com, or any other CNAM service, so we doubt we would be a target of an attack for this data or that this data would be sell-able even if we were bad actors. Our perspective is that requiring phone verification allows us to provide a better level of service to customers.