Quote:
Originally Posted by TenFour
Google knows that without a recovery phone number a ton of people will get locked out of their accounts. Check out any Gmail help forum and most of the posts are people begging for help to get back into their accounts, and a high-percentage of the time they say they have lost the password for some reason. I imagine a high-percentage of these posts are from scammers who want to hack someone's account, but legitimate ones soon learn that the only way back into a Google account is via automated systems that seem to default to sending codes to the registered phone number. Even when you have a recovery email address the systems seem to default to sending texts to your phone number.
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I feel like that's like the official response, but it is COMPLETELY in their hands. They can very easily use alternate email addresses to verify the account, or let you generate codes from Google Authenticator, or any number of other methods that don't need you to share your PII. Under the pretext of making our accounts more "secure", they are just getting our PII.
I'm okay with that being an option I can CHOOSE to use for my accounts, but now it feels practically mandatory if you don't want to risk losing your account. Also, if you end up moving to a different place, there's almost no way for you to escape this data collection even on an old account.
Maybe this should be a separate topic though ..