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.
Nonsense. You don’t even have to use Google’s authenticator when setting up MFA. You can just scan the QR it gives you using any authenticator app. You can use Microsoft Authenticator, Duo Mobile, Lastpass, WatchGaurd, etc, etc
Phone numbers are an attack vector. Especially for 2FA.
Wait until they hear about this thing called a phone book.
Actually I had to let go of an email because Google wouldn’t let me login without giving my number or alternative email
Google can close your email account down at any time for any stupid reason they like and their nonexistant support will leave you standing in the rain without access to years of mails. Switch to a paid mailer with actual support ASAP
I once paid for Lavabit email and it was then raided by the NSA/CIA/FBI (Snowden case) and they shut everything down. I lost access to my account and to a 3rd party account that had a considerable amount of money pending withdrawal. I was never able to get the money. Lesson learnt: paying for your email won’t save you.
Ya, never trust US companies. Their government’s crazy to jump in and take anything they want; you may not even know they took it.
Well… Not sure if other gov won’t act the same way in a similar situation.
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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.
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
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
Man I haven’t even seen a phone book in at least 10 years. Do they actually still exist?
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
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.
For all valid reasons for moving away from Google services, this just ISN’T one, as other comments already pointed out.
I agree. But just wanted to say that plenty of email service providers do not require a phone number.
Using authenticator for 2FA is also better than SMS.
Using someone else’s computer for receiving your mail… That’s quite cringe !
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.
Thanks for reminding me to backup my emails locally and forward my gmail to proton, Good guy google.
Your proton account is susceptible to the same problem if your password gets compromised and you don’t have a backup access method registered.
This isn’t actually about your phone number.
I got the same message because I do have my phone listed in there, but don’t have a recovery email address listed.
thank you for the reminder. I keep needing to do this.
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