Why Twitter is paying for your cellphone number

Twitter wants to gain a bigger presence in the lives of consumers, and so it’s going behind the scenes of how we connect to our smartphone apps. The most obvious route? Our phone numbers.

Last week, it launched a new mobile platform for developers called Fabric, and a core feature called Digits where Twitter foots the bill to send costly registration texts.That seems generous of Twitter, but there’s a catch: Twitter gets to keep those phone numbers too, and store them on its servers.