You have no idea how many people forget their passwords without a recovery mechanism. They’ll go online and complain that Google’s customer service wouldn’t tell them their passwords and how they’ve lost ten years of family pictures because Google hurt them so bad.
Google can almost certainly find your phone number in the many emails they’re already receiving on your behalf. You’re not protecting your information by not providing it to them directly.
If you’re not going to add a recovery phone number, at least provide a recovery email address.
You dont even need google to access your emails for that. You dont even need to be a google user at all, unfortunately.
I think the phone number is easily found by google, by all their users synching their contact list… If you’re google and you have 100 people Synching John B. Smith with number 123 in Region A of the world, you’re pretty confident that that the person and the phone number are linked.
Imagine you didn’t even heard about google, but some of your colleague/friend use Google contact synching (which is very default these days) And ta da! Google knows your name and number with 99% percent of accuracy.
I used to work in support for a phone manufacturer. I spent more hours than I’d like to know helping people navigate Google account recovery because their only computing device was their phone which they just got replaced under warranty and they don’t remember their Google password. The lucky ones had set a recovery phone number and/or email, the unlucky ones were simply at the mercy of the ivory tower that is Google
“or recovery email”
You have no idea how many people forget their passwords without a recovery mechanism. They’ll go online and complain that Google’s customer service wouldn’t tell them their passwords and how they’ve lost ten years of family pictures because Google hurt them so bad.
Google can almost certainly find your phone number in the many emails they’re already receiving on your behalf. You’re not protecting your information by not providing it to them directly.
If you’re not going to add a recovery phone number, at least provide a recovery email address.
You dont even need google to access your emails for that. You dont even need to be a google user at all, unfortunately.
I think the phone number is easily found by google, by all their users synching their contact list… If you’re google and you have 100 people Synching John B. Smith with number 123 in Region A of the world, you’re pretty confident that that the person and the phone number are linked.
And that’s terrifying.
Imagine you didn’t even heard about google, but some of your colleague/friend use Google contact synching (which is very default these days) And ta da! Google knows your name and number with 99% percent of accuracy.
Exactly. You don’t even need to have ever used the internet. It’s concerning, to say the least…
I used to work in support for a phone manufacturer. I spent more hours than I’d like to know helping people navigate Google account recovery because their only computing device was their phone which they just got replaced under warranty and they don’t remember their Google password. The lucky ones had set a recovery phone number and/or email, the unlucky ones were simply at the mercy of the ivory tower that is Google