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.
Google started requiring phone numbers years ago, it’s an attempt to cut down spam and bot accounts. You can only register so many accounts on a single phone number and getting phone numbers at scale is much more expensive than sending a bot through the signup process.
This has nothing to do with compromise, they just don’t want to deal with this many bot accounts. I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Apple do the same thing.
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.
Google started requiring phone numbers years ago, it’s an attempt to cut down spam and bot accounts. You can only register so many accounts on a single phone number and getting phone numbers at scale is much more expensive than sending a bot through the signup process.
This has nothing to do with compromise, they just don’t want to deal with this many bot accounts. I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Apple do the same thing.
Clearly.
Whatever excuse they might have doesn’t change the fact that they are extorting phone numbers from people.