Gmail prompt to provide phone number sounds like a threat
Dumb take. All it’s warning you is that without those, you won’t have a way to recover your account it you lose your password or if it’s hacked and someone changes it.
Yeah, I’m all for bashing companies regarding privacy and whatnot, but this is just informing/warning you about account security.
Yeah, probably, but I’ve noticed lots of sites use security as an excuse to get your phone number. For my work account Google forced me to enable 2FA for security reasons, but wouldn’t allow the authenticator, only my phone number, until they had it. Then I was allowed to switch to the authenticator. That was not a setting my employer could change, either, they tried for half an hour.
Phone numbers are used to congregate the your data that’s collected on different sites to one profile. I’m pretty sure that is the main reason Google and others are pushing you so hard to give it up.
Phone numbers are an attack vector. Especially for 2FA.
Actually I had to let go of an email because Google wouldn’t let me login without giving my number or alternative email
Wait until they hear about this thing called a phone book.
Can confirm.
Google locked me out of my account for not giving them my phone number. Even though I used the correct password. Even though I verified myself through the recovery email, which has been the same for ages. Even though I wasn’t using a VPN or connecting from a public network. Even though there was no reason to think my account or credentials were compromised.
They are, in fact, extorting phone numbers from people.
Thankfully, I don’t depend on my google account for anything, but I’m still stuck receiving spam forwarded by gmail, because I can’t log in to turn off forwarding. (I’ll probably have to filter it out at some point.) I honestly hope they just delete my account after some months without a phone number.
If you can’t login they will definitely delete the account sooner or later.
They’ve been sending out notices recently talking about changes to their account inactivity policy saying just that.
So Google will not let me log in to my account unless I provide them my phone number? But at the same time they require a regular log in (at least once a year or every two years), so your account doesn’t get deleted?
I have an old Gmail account, I don’t use anymore, but it’s tied to my name, so I wouldn’t want someone else to use it at some point. I thinks there’s one email client that regularly connects to that account. I hope that will be sufficient to preserve it, but I would not feel comfortable giving them my phone number, when I have no other links to Google services (this may be different, if you use an Android phone anyway).
2 years and it’ll be deleted.
I still have a Gmail account but I’m trying better solutions… Maybe my own hosted system. Whether I pay google or a hosting company with open source software is the same money, the latter means privacy
Have you people never heard of a phone book? Phone numbers aren’t sensitive information. If they want to scrape your phone number they can legally and trivially do so through public data sources. Google does plenty of sketchy things around privacy, but this isn’t one of them, it’s just about security.
Is your mobile phone number in the phone book? Mine isn’t. I guess you could use a landline number to prevent giving out information that isn’t publicly available, but I’d wager most people using these sites these days use their mobile phones. Also even my landline isn’t listed in the phone book.
I still have a landline which I use specifically for entering into websites.
At one point I thought it was a really clever thing to do, but now I’m not sure what I’m accomplishing with that, if anything.
Man I haven’t even seen a phone book in at least 10 years. Do they actually still exist?
I mostly agree, however setting your phone number includes the verification process. With that, Google knows for near certain that this is indeed your number.
No it doesn’t. It means that your email is encrypted and they don’t have a way to unlock it. If you don’t add recovery info or print out your unlock codes, you will lose access. Just like it says.
2FA is more secure.
At this point I would say stay away from all Google services.
I even moved away from Gmail. It’s very liberating.
I’m slowly moving over to Proton and with the integration of SimpleLogin I’m starting to finally feel in control of my inbox.
BuT cOrPoRaTiOnS tRaCk YoUr LoCaTiOn If yOu GiVe ThEm YouR nUmBeR
Like they’d need your phone number to do that when you probably already have a smartphone with Facebook installed
I hate how reliant I’ve become on my Gmail. My banking, all my accounts, my job, etc.
I think email should be regulated, because of how much of the modern world relies on them and you can get fucked over and locked out super easy, and trying to change the email on some services isn’t just hard, it’s impossible
Regulation is slow, full of drama, scales poorly, & can result in a legal thicket that teams of lawyers can navigate better than the individuals it’s intended to advocate for. Decriminalizing interoperability is faster & can handle most of the small/simple cases, freeing up our community/legislative resources to focus on the most important regulatory needs.
I have been slowly de-googling my life. I bought a domain, and have my email hosted on no-ip.com for like $15 a year now. Has been working great for the past 8 months. I have switched all my important login accounts to those accounts. I’m still keeping the spammy store logins and such on Google. The only thing worrying me about loosing with my Google account are all my app purchases going back back to the day it existed.
Pirate them
Using someone else’s computer for receiving your mail… That’s quite cringe !
thank you for the reminder. I keep needing to do this.
Didn’t help me when my account got locked. Had 2fa and all the info they wanted and never got the account back. Fuck google.
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