Google is probably most aggresive anti-privacy company currently operating.
No other company goes to such great lengths to deanonymize users and make it difficult to use it's services, especially during account creation.
The requirement to posses mobile device to scan QR code to verify if you are human. Reverse SMS verification - where you have to sent the SMS, not receive the code.
Not being able to watch YT videos when not signed in to google account - under disguise of "bot protection".
It's esentially almost impossible to create google account without giving up your identity and your phone number is often leads to your real life identity.
Trying to fight it takes an enormous amount of time and energy. I carry two phones now - since I have my "privacy" enabled phone that basically has nothing on it. Email, messages, weather app and a few privacy enabled browsers. My other phone has all my "faux" google stuff on it. Maps, gmail, banking apps, my authenticator apps, music apps, etc.
Even then, these can all be tied together fairly easy, but just trying to make it harder to keep my data private is such a battle; and friends always ask me why I spend so much time trying to keep myself anonymous when in 2026 its virtually impossible to do so.
I always tell them:
“Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.” (To live well is to live concealed.)
Having two phones is more common than you think, and has a very plausible explanation even if it's not true for the particular individual: One is my work phone, issued by my company, other one is mine
Follow the usernames in the response chain. I have two phones for the exact same reason as well: work issued & personal. It would hold up just because it’s actually true. There’s no need to arrange anything beyond how they are naturally arranged.
By rights the simple comeback is they can lie to you so F'em.
The real answer is you don't offer any explaination because it's not something you need to explain or get anyone's permission for.
Feel free to wonder. Give me a hard time and I'll just do my best to give you a hard time back. After you confiscate my stuff and detain me and I turn out not to have broken any laws, I'll do everything I can think of to extract an apology and compensation and penalty. Afro Man is my hero. You will become my new career.
That's my little fantasy anyway but I do see it as a duty to at least resist a little. In reality I'll fold pretty easy but I will be as much sand in the gears as I can.
You're not lying to the police in this situation if you've ever done anything ever remotely related to work on the "faux" phone only. That is still considered the "whole truth" in that scenario and would be easy to defend. It's absolutely absurd we need to even think ahead like this, but cops are (mostly) dumb enforcement. They don't actually know the laws in-depth and in many cases do not abide by them - which is the root of labeling them as such. Beating a cop at the game they're playing is not hard, you just have to know every question they ask is loaded and for a reason.
I feel like BYOD was when the disease accelerated. It was the coup excuse for everybody and their mother to own a piece of your personal phone. Bank apps not working with rooted phones is pretty much BYOD 2.0.
That annoying. Don't have android as my daily driver anymore but for many years the first thing I did was enable developer or debug or whatever (by tapping the build number over and over) so you can disable all system animations to speed things up. And enable the "show touches" feature which I found super useful
In Uganda carrying two phones is completely normal. Many people have one for work and one for personal use, or simply because they can afford a second phone. Police wouldn't think twice about it.
Nothing like that is required, if you see them on same mobile tower or wifi networks often enough you can say with huge certainty they are owned by same individual.
Basically any piece of information that can be correlated is enough once you have enough data points. Hell, you could probably figure out a way to correlate it by temperature sensor readings
> I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities.
Every scammer, fraudster, scammer-in-training, fraudster-in-training, uses a Google account.
The first company federal investigators often go for data is often Google because that's the start of their lead into their investigation. Google needs to provide answers, sometimes by regulation in countries.
Have you noticed the front page article sharing front page real estate with this one about Big Tech getting in trouble for not doing more to stop scamming and fraudsters?
Regulators want Big Tech to stop children from doing various things (such as access certain platforms or content), to stop fraudsters and scammers, to stop foreign intelligence operations or bots from astroturfing social media/manipulating social discourse, and so on.
Failing to so leads to inquiries, new laws or regulations, fines, and so on.
The technical solutions to combat these problems are the exact solutions that also ruin privacy for users, create friction at account creation time, require ever more draconian identity verification methods and so on. It's 1:1.
"I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities."
It's really not any more complicated than that Governments have told them its time to start violating users privacy in order to combat these other problems.
> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.
A process I've gone through a few times (though I didn't actually want a Google Account):
1) Get a new (second-hand sometimes) ChromeOS or Android device.
2) (if necessary) do a power-wash or factory-reset.
3) Do the "set up a new device" process.
4) When it asks you for a Google account, click on the "I don't have one. create a new account" button.
In all these cases, the device didn't (or couldn't, in the case of the Chromebook) have a SIMcard in it, so it couldn't link it to a phone number.
One smartphone that I bought for $20, and never (IIRC) had a SIMCard in, I think the only identity-oriented app I have on it is Netflix. I've wondered if Google links the smartphone's google account to the Netflix account (which is actually not me, but a cousin's), and whether Netflix is complicit in this linking.
> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.
I had a Gmail account before they required phone numbers. One day, Google stopped allowing me to log in, demanding my phone number if I wanted to continue. Nothing was wrong with my credentials, or behavior patterns, or IP address, or anything at all. My already-registered recovery email address didn't help. There was no way to appeal.
I'm not willing to have my phone number extorted from me, so I sighed and accepted that I'll never again have use of that account. It remains a constant source of irritation, because it still forwards incoming messages to my home email address, and Google doesn't do a very good job of filtering out all the spam before they forward it my way.
Adding insult to injury, Google still (years later) hasn't made good on their announcement that idle accounts would be deleted. I wish they would. I'm done with Google.
Not OP and loving that the upper part of that linked page comes with a warning message:
> Your account, @gmail.com, doesn’t have a recovery phone number. If you’re locked out of your account, a recovery phone number helps you get back in. [Add recovery phone]
You could get a burner number for $5 to use for the SMS verification. You might want to do this before your inbox fills up and you become unable to receive emails, and before they disable SMS verification and require an Android phone verification.
Maybe, but I am not aware of anybody being forced to make a Facebook account.
Even in Europe, many banks are now blackmailing their clients into making Google accounts, as a condition for continuing to have access to online banking (and even if you had not wanted online banking, that would have been a difficult choice, as many brick-and-mortar bank agencies have been closed).
The banks have deactivated the hardware devices that provided one-time access tokens and they now require for login an app installed on your smartphone, and they refuse to give you the app from any other source except the Google store (or Apple store). You cannot download any app from the Google store without a Google account.
It would be enough for the banks to provide the apk file for downloading on their Web site, to be able to avoid having a Google account.
As an American, I have a stupid question here: Europeans are smart and capable. Why would they be satisfied with this kind of international dependency for something as important as banking?
Recently its taken over and I can't switch back to Assistant on Android. Now I have timers that run for a bit and then disappear, and whenever I'm driving and use voice to call it brings up the phone number and requires me to press again to dial.
Absolutely frustrating and I don't understand how this can be pushed as the default.
I can only assume its another scenario where they disable all the features because I'm not in the US, but then never tested it.
First time Gemini popped up in gmail I asked it what the best open source alternative to gsuite was and it and disappeard in a puff of smoke, never to be seen again, I don't even know how to ask it back for a second taunting.
> No other big-tech company goes to such great lengths to deanonymize users and make its services difficult to use, especially during account creation.
meta comes to mind? you can't even interact with their services unless you have an account, and they ban you if you don't reveal yourself transparently. then they ask you for a state-issued ID to appeal bans. seems like some great lengths to me.
I agree. Meta is as bad as if not worse than Google.
It is however much easier to navigate life without Meta than without Google. Even if you use different email, etc, if you collaborate with someone on a doc or whatever they are likely to send you a google link.
> they ask you for a state-issued ID to appeal bans
Requires ID for "age verification" to ensure pedos aren't talking to children
"Move fast and break things" mentality, so IDs leak
Pedos use your leaked ID. You land on a list. Meta/Google/Discord/Persona/whoever pays you $20 and gets a slap on the wrist
IDs become useless, so Altman promotes WorldCoin and we all get our eyeballs scanned
Rinse, lather, repeat. Surveillance state grows. Terrorists continue to do terrorist stuff. Pedos continue to do pedo stuff. Normal people get random visits from gestapo because they are 110% sure you were involved in a crime despite proof that you were in a different state at the time.
Age verification is pretty aggressive... recently tried creating a youtube account (google) and they require gov't id/facecheck/creditcard? once you hit age restricted content.
Interesting - that's actually the hardline for me I refuse to cross. I will just refuse to use a service at that point if it 'requires' me to hand over a government ID.
I get pissed off enough when I have to do stupid anti-money laundering facial scan BS.
They also attached to a VERY HIGH NUMBER of ip addresses when you launch Chrome. Run an application level firewall and look at Chrome's behavior on startup. So many that I think they are geolocating users, even across VPNs
Once they've calculated the VPN exit point, with sufficient data they can eliminate that and reveal the ping times 'behind the curtain' back to your actual ISP. That gives a geolocation radius that can be correlated with other data.
> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity
The main reason they do this is to control abusive use of Google accounts. The goal of making it as easy as possible to create an account is in tension with the goal of making it hard to abuse people through Google services.
These policies + the despotic trajectory the US is on is very worrisome.
Imagine what such a government could do with access to all your emails, search history, video history, and web history? If you’re labeled “woke” or some variation of enemy of the state they have plenty of ammo to identify you and break you.
Speculative tangent but I don’t think trump will go away if he loses the elections. He’s made allusions to cancel elections if they don’t go his way next and I believe he’s capable of it. Wouldn’t be surprised if the US becomes a dictatorship next.
> Not being able to watch YouTube videos when using VPN - without signing in to a Google account, all under the guise of "bot protection."
The problem is that, being an advertising company, views are real money for them and their content creators. The level of fraud in this area is huge. I don't like it either but without it people will just viewbot everything.
Is there a chance any of that is linked to the million scammers that sign up for more and more free accounts, sending spam, getting banned, and then repeating it?
It used to be most of our spam came from Google accounts, and some still does, but now that is far and away outpaced by spam coming from Microsoft who does not take those same steps to deanonymize users. Also, “bot traffic” (AI traffic) is definitely a very real problem sites deal with. Also, you know who else uses Gemini from VPNs?
All the things you complain about seem to have real, direct consequences when not done.
I’m with you, I don’t want to be tracked and don’t want log in to every website. Just saying the reasons are pretty compelling when the reality we live in these days is a connected world with advanced technology where your average teenage could potentially hack a power plant and your average scammer can now use far more advanced AI tools to trick people.
This will only get worse, which is the real reason for the quiet US/EU push to unmask users, require IDs, etc. and not because some kids go online to naughty websites with boobs on them.
That's why I stay away from trying Gemini or doing anything much with Google until I still host my main gmail account there. One misstep and I'll find myself locked out. Because it's Google's job to spy on everyone, if I have other accounts there, those will also locked out too ("or you're trying to circumvent our ban, we noticed!" kind of a thing). Then the only recourse from what I understand is to make an HN post and hope it makes it to the front page and someone from Google who knows someone else at Google will help you.
Our corporate policy doesn't allow personal phones to be linked to corp accounts, for obvious reasons. We have no idea what kind of security your personal phone number has setup, nor do we compensate employees for their personal phones, nor do we want corporate communications happening on your personal device (work/life separation).
If the vendor is unable to comply, all we're using them for is email. Time to look elsewhere.
Is it silent, though? I got notifactions about it on my devices, then emails on each account. Then I went straight to delete the added numbers and disabled this "feature". It did not leave a good taste that I had to do this after the fact, I would have appreciated a notice with a chance to opt out first, because they may have already permanently stored those numbers in some internal history (I just asked Dropbox for my data and they listed every single email I've ever used on that account too). But, to be honest, I am not surprised, and I already consider all devices and numbers that ever come into contact with a Google account being permanently on record on some Google server.
fuck. keeping your phone number off accounts is an important security step as many attacks require that you have a phone number connected.
If it's ever been on there you cant trust that some long forgotten recovery pathway can't be convinced to use it to authenticate access to your account.
> At least those you can turn into covert password fields because they cannot verify them.
Don't do this.
I tried to do this and it turned into a very bad time with their CSRs.
The "security questions" are designed to be answered verbally. They are also designed to be "something you know" that is unlikely to be forgotten, misplaced, or change. Rather than randomized passwords, they're supposed to be something intrinsic to your life that you always remember, especially in a crisis time, and when your scribbled-down credential list is missing.
Based on imitation of a very paranoid security wonk acquaintance, I once set all these security answers to long strings of hexadecimal digits, auto-randomized by KeePass. Big mistake.
They worked for as long as I was setting them, but eventually a CSR, verbally on the phone, began to ask me what they were. The hex strings were nearly impossible to dictate over the voice connection. Also the CSR was kind of pissed about this misuse.
Security questions/answers aren't passwords. Don't subvert them into this use. Your service provider knows what they're doing. Doing this "clever" shit will only hurt yourself, and you're shooting future-you in the foot.
They don't know what they are doing if they have those questions. I've found mine in multiple data breaches. If they were real they'd broadly grant access to every account.
Or maybe to be more accurate: they do know what they're doing, recovery is a cost center so they're minimizing it. But outside of special cases with special statutory affordance (like credit card fraud) the loss is on you* if you get robbed via their weak security. So companies are intentionally minimizing their costs because you're the one that takes the cost when their security is poor.
I have encounter the pronounceable issue-- though reading 32 hex characters over the phone really wasn't *that* bad. So now-- and for the last 15 years-- I make them pronounceable passwords.
> especially in a crisis time
I've tried to organize my life so that I never need 'crisis' access to some stupid online account. I recommend it!
In a crisis, you wouldn’t need to access your banks, or your patient portal, or refill prescriptions at your pharmacy, or shop for groceries? Or just, simply… sign in to your personal Apple/Microsoft/Google account at all?
I keep emergency cash. Why would I need a login to get a prescription? ... and rent can be late and/or paid with a check. Medical providers can access my records without my help at all-- pretty important since I might be unconscious!
What kind of cyberpunk dystopia do you live in where you need a login to an electronic service to get groceries?!
If that kind of dependency on third party services is normal then I'm glad to be weird!
Putting aside whether it's best to use them as the company intended, random pronounceable word sequences should be strictly-better than hex/ASCII ones. (Presuming the company isn't limiting "answers" to unreasonably short character lengths.)
Another risk is that someone will call up and say "it's just a bunch of random stuff" and the customer service rep will go: "Okay, that's right, moving on..."
You can't be serious. I honestly can't tell if your whole reply is a parody.
The security practices of most large service providers are terrible. That's why large data leaks and security breaches by the world's largest businesses are a daily event.
I don't think this is new. If you have ever gotten a "fuck off and die" letter from AdSense after like 2010 or so, then you know they will correlate your identity and ban your other accounts too. They don't ban accounts, they ban people.
I've also heard of people getting oopsied trying to farm the GCP demo credits and someone on HN once claimed that a company's gsuite tenant was actioned when they hired somebody on google's naughty list.
All my SIMs I've used in my phone seem to have been added as verified phone numbers to my primary account, but my secondary accounts don't have any phone numbers still.
It's still somewhat obnoxious since it means random travel sims that could get reused after they expire are "verified" for my account.
Just the other day I tried to log into the Google account I have connected only to this HN account, and Google asked me to use the account linked to the backup email address on that account to verify my login, then logged me into that account on my phone when I used it to verify my login. After that point I saw my phone number attached to the HN-specific Gmail account, though it may have been attached before.
It really bothers me that every dick and jane website has normalized asking for your personal phone number. It's the first thing they ask when you sign up. At this point your phone number has become your social security number of the internet.
I don't care if fighting fraud is hard for you. Figure it out without stripping away my privacy.
Yeah, phone numbers are essentially KYC. I use a phone number verification site, but I can't recommend them because they stopped accepting Monero recently.
Google knows all about virtual phone numbers and won't accept them. If you don't have a number issued by a large telco, forget about creating a Google account.
It's super annoying, because it's normally also a path for account recovery. So if you need to change your number, good luck remembering where you have signed up with it.
> It really bothers me that every dick and jane website has normalized asking for your personal phone number.
The most a website will get from me is a unique email address and a bogus phone number. If it insists on verifying that phone number, it loses my business.
It can still be worse. Imagine this: you create an account. You can use the service's free tier. You decide to pay, so you enter your name, address, and credit card number. You get charged. Then you download their app to use the service, you trigger their OAuth flow and... it requires you to enter a phone number, not letting you use your subscription for which you already paid for without a phone number. Oh and, bonus points: you can't delete your credit card information from their system. There's no reachable human customer support, and the only way to delete your CC information from their system is to delete your whole account.
Now, which service I'm talking about? OpenAI's ChatGPT Pro, or more specifically, their Codex subscription. You can subscribe to their ChatGPT Pro for $200 no problem, no phone number in necessary, but you can't actually use it in Codex without a phone number as the OAuth flow requires you to enter one. And how do I know this? Well, I'm sure you can guess... :P
Claude tried demanding a photo ID from me when I tried to pay for services. I've never had that happen before. It was an _even worse_ feeling than having to give out a phone number: I can just rotate my phone number from my carrier.
> you can't delete your credit card information from their system
In cases like this (for me it has been Verizon and Adobe), you can usually change your credit card on file. Nowadays I use Privacy merchant-locked cards for everything online but in the cases where I used a physical credit card, I would change it to a Privacy card and then pause that card or put a monthly cap on charges (after making a reasonable effort to cancel.)
and then they lock it in harder by using it for 2-or-more-factor authentication
apple has dark patterns for this, trying to get your phone number into their system. You have to do something like "other options" then "don't upgrade security" or something.
Its taking me awhile (about a month so far) but Im migrating my Google Pixel 5A to Google Pixel 10 Pro and GraphenOS. Its a step but seriously worth it to avoid the Google stink. RFC messaging is the only real breakage Ive seen so far in that folks that have me in a group msg dont work any more (actually that COULD work as a feature and so far everyone Ive talked to that swear they sent a msg are iPhone users so it could be another Google-Apple pissing contest underway.
The biggest player in ad tech also being the biggest provider of mobile phone operating systems and email services was only ever going to end up this way. I'm not a big fan of regulation but at some point a single corporate entity should not be allowed to control all the things.
Anyone still having doubts about this company? To be fair: the US corporations all do that. I remember how Facebook linked off-connection data together. They are all operating in the same manner here, sustaining US spy interests.
I felt a bit betrayed when I discovered that Facebook has a list of the people I have communicated with on Whatsapp, and was sharing this list with their advertisers. Not just the phone numbers, but the Facebook accounts. My Whatsapp is not associated with Facebook in any way except that they have the same phone number, and I do not have Facebook on my phone.
Probably only 0.0001% of people care about this. It makes sense that the more convenient option is default. There's an option to turn it off if you want.
Sure, it's bad Google is anti-privacy and they're trying to stop you making an anonymous account, but that is their business model.
You're much better off using and supporting privacy focused services [1] instead of trying to make Google private. I do not have any Google accounts I depend on–I deleted all of them that I'd used personally, and now I only have attempts at anonymous accounts.
I wouldn't rely on them even if I wasn't constantly getting banned because they have no customer support, no E2EE, they scan your photos, it's insanity.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 53.7 ms ] threadNo other company goes to such great lengths to deanonymize users and make it difficult to use it's services, especially during account creation.
The requirement to posses mobile device to scan QR code to verify if you are human. Reverse SMS verification - where you have to sent the SMS, not receive the code.
Not being able to watch YT videos when not signed in to google account - under disguise of "bot protection".
It's esentially almost impossible to create google account without giving up your identity and your phone number is often leads to your real life identity.
Even then, these can all be tied together fairly easy, but just trying to make it harder to keep my data private is such a battle; and friends always ask me why I spend so much time trying to keep myself anonymous when in 2026 its virtually impossible to do so.
I always tell them: “Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.” (To live well is to live concealed.)
That happens all the time
By rights the simple comeback is they can lie to you so F'em.
The real answer is you don't offer any explaination because it's not something you need to explain or get anyone's permission for.
Feel free to wonder. Give me a hard time and I'll just do my best to give you a hard time back. After you confiscate my stuff and detain me and I turn out not to have broken any laws, I'll do everything I can think of to extract an apology and compensation and penalty. Afro Man is my hero. You will become my new career.
That's my little fantasy anyway but I do see it as a duty to at least resist a little. In reality I'll fold pretty easy but I will be as much sand in the gears as I can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
One of my bank apps had a time where it refused to work if I wasn't using the default system keyboard. Luckily they rolled that back.
The times of actually owning your hardware are long over.
I once had to take four phones with me for a short while and ended up looking like an absolute clown, stacking them on the restaurant table.
Not having to do that is a privilege.
I thought it was funny putting the camera stickers on multiple phones at a nightclub entrance.
Basically any piece of information that can be correlated is enough once you have enough data points. Hell, you could probably figure out a way to correlate it by temperature sensor readings
Every scammer, fraudster, scammer-in-training, fraudster-in-training, uses a Google account.
The first company federal investigators often go for data is often Google because that's the start of their lead into their investigation. Google needs to provide answers, sometimes by regulation in countries.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/14/dating-app-s...
Regulators want Big Tech to stop children from doing various things (such as access certain platforms or content), to stop fraudsters and scammers, to stop foreign intelligence operations or bots from astroturfing social media/manipulating social discourse, and so on.
Failing to so leads to inquiries, new laws or regulations, fines, and so on.
The technical solutions to combat these problems are the exact solutions that also ruin privacy for users, create friction at account creation time, require ever more draconian identity verification methods and so on. It's 1:1.
"I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities."
It's really not any more complicated than that Governments have told them its time to start violating users privacy in order to combat these other problems.
A process I've gone through a few times (though I didn't actually want a Google Account):
1) Get a new (second-hand sometimes) ChromeOS or Android device.
2) (if necessary) do a power-wash or factory-reset.
3) Do the "set up a new device" process.
4) When it asks you for a Google account, click on the "I don't have one. create a new account" button.
In all these cases, the device didn't (or couldn't, in the case of the Chromebook) have a SIMcard in it, so it couldn't link it to a phone number.
One smartphone that I bought for $20, and never (IIRC) had a SIMCard in, I think the only identity-oriented app I have on it is Netflix. I've wondered if Google links the smartphone's google account to the Netflix account (which is actually not me, but a cousin's), and whether Netflix is complicit in this linking.
FWIW I've never seen this.
I had a Gmail account before they required phone numbers. One day, Google stopped allowing me to log in, demanding my phone number if I wanted to continue. Nothing was wrong with my credentials, or behavior patterns, or IP address, or anything at all. My already-registered recovery email address didn't help. There was no way to appeal.
I'm not willing to have my phone number extorted from me, so I sighed and accepted that I'll never again have use of that account. It remains a constant source of irritation, because it still forwards incoming messages to my home email address, and Google doesn't do a very good job of filtering out all the spam before they forward it my way.
Adding insult to injury, Google still (years later) hasn't made good on their announcement that idle accounts would be deleted. I wish they would. I'm done with Google.
They should be after 2 years, I occasionally get emails, linking: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290
> Your account, @gmail.com, doesn’t have a recovery phone number. If you’re locked out of your account, a recovery phone number helps you get back in. [Add recovery phone]
Dunno. Facebook is pretty ruthless and evil here as well.
Even in Europe, many banks are now blackmailing their clients into making Google accounts, as a condition for continuing to have access to online banking (and even if you had not wanted online banking, that would have been a difficult choice, as many brick-and-mortar bank agencies have been closed).
The banks have deactivated the hardware devices that provided one-time access tokens and they now require for login an app installed on your smartphone, and they refuse to give you the app from any other source except the Google store (or Apple store). You cannot download any app from the Google store without a Google account.
It would be enough for the banks to provide the apk file for downloading on their Web site, to be able to avoid having a Google account.
isnt that their only business model almost from day 1? Everyone shitting on Meta because of privacy but Google's the worst.
Then they found that showing ads with the search results made them a lot more money.
They started optimizing for money made from ads, which depends on user data - letting advertisers show ads to targeted customers.
Recently its taken over and I can't switch back to Assistant on Android. Now I have timers that run for a bit and then disappear, and whenever I'm driving and use voice to call it brings up the phone number and requires me to press again to dial.
Absolutely frustrating and I don't understand how this can be pushed as the default.
I can only assume its another scenario where they disable all the features because I'm not in the US, but then never tested it.
meta comes to mind? you can't even interact with their services unless you have an account, and they ban you if you don't reveal yourself transparently. then they ask you for a state-issued ID to appeal bans. seems like some great lengths to me.
It is however much easier to navigate life without Meta than without Google. Even if you use different email, etc, if you collaborate with someone on a doc or whatever they are likely to send you a google link.
One up-and-coming entrant is cloudflare, which prevents you from accessing websites unless you have javascript and cookies enabled.
all the other cdn providers do this too, like akamai, fastly, cloudflare, etc.
"Move fast and break things" mentality, so IDs leak
Pedos use your leaked ID. You land on a list. Meta/Google/Discord/Persona/whoever pays you $20 and gets a slap on the wrist
IDs become useless, so Altman promotes WorldCoin and we all get our eyeballs scanned
Rinse, lather, repeat. Surveillance state grows. Terrorists continue to do terrorist stuff. Pedos continue to do pedo stuff. Normal people get random visits from gestapo because they are 110% sure you were involved in a crime despite proof that you were in a different state at the time.
We're really creating a great world...
I get pissed off enough when I have to do stupid anti-money laundering facial scan BS.
also: you can subscribe to duckduckgo ($99 or $199/year) and that gives you not only VPN access, but DDaaS - Data Deletion as a Service.
:)
(don't know how data deletion works outside of california, but I think california allows global deletion now)
The main reason they do this is to control abusive use of Google accounts. The goal of making it as easy as possible to create an account is in tension with the goal of making it hard to abuse people through Google services.
Imagine what such a government could do with access to all your emails, search history, video history, and web history? If you’re labeled “woke” or some variation of enemy of the state they have plenty of ammo to identify you and break you.
Speculative tangent but I don’t think trump will go away if he loses the elections. He’s made allusions to cancel elections if they don’t go his way next and I believe he’s capable of it. Wouldn’t be surprised if the US becomes a dictatorship next.
Yes, they stopped "not being evil"
The problem is that, being an advertising company, views are real money for them and their content creators. The level of fraud in this area is huge. I don't like it either but without it people will just viewbot everything.
It used to be most of our spam came from Google accounts, and some still does, but now that is far and away outpaced by spam coming from Microsoft who does not take those same steps to deanonymize users. Also, “bot traffic” (AI traffic) is definitely a very real problem sites deal with. Also, you know who else uses Gemini from VPNs?
All the things you complain about seem to have real, direct consequences when not done.
I’m with you, I don’t want to be tracked and don’t want log in to every website. Just saying the reasons are pretty compelling when the reality we live in these days is a connected world with advanced technology where your average teenage could potentially hack a power plant and your average scammer can now use far more advanced AI tools to trick people.
This will only get worse, which is the real reason for the quiet US/EU push to unmask users, require IDs, etc. and not because some kids go online to naughty websites with boobs on them.
If the vendor is unable to comply, all we're using them for is email. Time to look elsewhere.
If it's ever been on there you cant trust that some long forgotten recovery pathway can't be convinced to use it to authenticate access to your account.
Phone numbers they 'verify' so you cant just put in a uniformly random 10 digit number and authenticate later through knowledge of it.
Don't do this.
I tried to do this and it turned into a very bad time with their CSRs.
The "security questions" are designed to be answered verbally. They are also designed to be "something you know" that is unlikely to be forgotten, misplaced, or change. Rather than randomized passwords, they're supposed to be something intrinsic to your life that you always remember, especially in a crisis time, and when your scribbled-down credential list is missing.
Based on imitation of a very paranoid security wonk acquaintance, I once set all these security answers to long strings of hexadecimal digits, auto-randomized by KeePass. Big mistake.
They worked for as long as I was setting them, but eventually a CSR, verbally on the phone, began to ask me what they were. The hex strings were nearly impossible to dictate over the voice connection. Also the CSR was kind of pissed about this misuse.
Security questions/answers aren't passwords. Don't subvert them into this use. Your service provider knows what they're doing. Doing this "clever" shit will only hurt yourself, and you're shooting future-you in the foot.
Or maybe to be more accurate: they do know what they're doing, recovery is a cost center so they're minimizing it. But outside of special cases with special statutory affordance (like credit card fraud) the loss is on you* if you get robbed via their weak security. So companies are intentionally minimizing their costs because you're the one that takes the cost when their security is poor.
I have encounter the pronounceable issue-- though reading 32 hex characters over the phone really wasn't *that* bad. So now-- and for the last 15 years-- I make them pronounceable passwords.
> especially in a crisis time
I've tried to organize my life so that I never need 'crisis' access to some stupid online account. I recommend it!
Weird, dude.
What kind of cyberpunk dystopia do you live in where you need a login to an electronic service to get groceries?!
If that kind of dependency on third party services is normal then I'm glad to be weird!
:D
Another risk is that someone will call up and say "it's just a bunch of random stuff" and the customer service rep will go: "Okay, that's right, moving on..."
You can't be serious. I honestly can't tell if your whole reply is a parody.
The security practices of most large service providers are terrible. That's why large data leaks and security breaches by the world's largest businesses are a daily event.
I've also heard of people getting oopsied trying to farm the GCP demo credits and someone on HN once claimed that a company's gsuite tenant was actioned when they hired somebody on google's naughty list.
All my SIMs I've used in my phone seem to have been added as verified phone numbers to my primary account, but my secondary accounts don't have any phone numbers still.
It's still somewhat obnoxious since it means random travel sims that could get reused after they expire are "verified" for my account.
I don't care if fighting fraud is hard for you. Figure it out without stripping away my privacy.
For long term numbers I would use jmp.chat.
I haven't used it yet, but I'm switching to it once my current plan runs out. There's plenty of options for data.
The most a website will get from me is a unique email address and a bogus phone number. If it insists on verifying that phone number, it loses my business.
It can still be worse. Imagine this: you create an account. You can use the service's free tier. You decide to pay, so you enter your name, address, and credit card number. You get charged. Then you download their app to use the service, you trigger their OAuth flow and... it requires you to enter a phone number, not letting you use your subscription for which you already paid for without a phone number. Oh and, bonus points: you can't delete your credit card information from their system. There's no reachable human customer support, and the only way to delete your CC information from their system is to delete your whole account.
Now, which service I'm talking about? OpenAI's ChatGPT Pro, or more specifically, their Codex subscription. You can subscribe to their ChatGPT Pro for $200 no problem, no phone number in necessary, but you can't actually use it in Codex without a phone number as the OAuth flow requires you to enter one. And how do I know this? Well, I'm sure you can guess... :P
Claude tried demanding a photo ID from me when I tried to pay for services. I've never had that happen before. It was an _even worse_ feeling than having to give out a phone number: I can just rotate my phone number from my carrier.
Maybe this is a new requirement and I am grandfathered in?
In cases like this (for me it has been Verizon and Adobe), you can usually change your credit card on file. Nowadays I use Privacy merchant-locked cards for everything online but in the cases where I used a physical credit card, I would change it to a Privacy card and then pause that card or put a monthly cap on charges (after making a reasonable effort to cancel.)
apple has dark patterns for this, trying to get your phone number into their system. You have to do something like "other options" then "don't upgrade security" or something.
Anyone still having doubts about this company? To be fair: the US corporations all do that. I remember how Facebook linked off-connection data together. They are all operating in the same manner here, sustaining US spy interests.
In practice, there isn't really an option to turn it off.
You're much better off using and supporting privacy focused services [1] instead of trying to make Google private. I do not have any Google accounts I depend on–I deleted all of them that I'd used personally, and now I only have attempts at anonymous accounts.
I wouldn't rely on them even if I wasn't constantly getting banned because they have no customer support, no E2EE, they scan your photos, it's insanity.
[1] https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/