I don’t bother to update the names on their lines, so they all probably link back to me.

Family plans are pretty common here, so I wouldn’t expect too much friction.

I would absolutely cooperate (obviously through a lawyer) with records if someone else on my family plan did something illegal.

I also have records showing that they pay me for the line.

Also yes, it would be a huge hassle. The probability of that happening is small, and I’m willing to risk it like many other things in life. I only do this for very trusted people.

Validating an account with a phone number constitutes phone use so, yes, Google and Youtube have shown an instance of belief that the person paying is the same as the person who uses.

>> It wasn't even that long ago that mobile phones didn't exist, and it was common for an entire household to share one fixed-line telephone number. In some parts of the world, this is still true, and relatives (or even friends) share a single phone number. Many phone services (especially for businesses) allow multiple inbound calls to or outbound calls from the same phone number.

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¹ https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHO...

This should be a hint that you've misdiagnosed the problem... shouldn't it?

Having his phone bill paid by his mom makes it his mom's phone number by default; it's then shared with him, making it a non-unique identifier. That's why it falls into Falsehood #4 (and likely into Falsehood #3, assuming that his mom has a separate phone number that she doesn't share with anyone else).

No, it makes his mom the account owner. Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number. Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO. It’s nonsensical. The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.

Which makes the phone numbers under her account hers.

> Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number.

It absolutely does mean that her number is actually your number. That you choose to share it with her doesn't change that; you can revoke that sharing at any time, or even cancel the line entirely.

(And of course, if both of you jointly own the account, then the numbers therein would simultaneously belong to both of you.)

> Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO.

Is the phone bill under the accountant's name and paid from the accountant's personal bank account in this hypothetical? Or is it under her employer's name, and paid from her employer's bank account? The answer to that question determines the owner of the CEO's phone number, and in neither case is the CEO himself personally the owner of that number.

> The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.

And if that assigned person was the son then it would've been the son's name that Google pulled instead of his mother's, and Google's ignorance of its own advice would've gone unnoticed.

My understanding and assumptions are evidently no worse than yours.

> account owners are different than account payers are different than account assignees

For residential/personal phone plans, they are not. In my T-Mobile account there is exactly one person who can be designated as the owner, payer, and assignee for all of the lines on my account, that person being me. I can at most change the label on a given line, but that label can be literally anything.

> Google is tying to account payers, not assignees.

There is no notion of an "assignee" from any perspective that Google can see. There is only the account payer, which is one and the same with the account owner.

(If the payer is not the owner, then that's called fraud and is a crime in most countries.)

> This is clearly incorrect to everyone else in this comment section.

And it's also clearly incorrect by Google's own guidelines as quoted above. That's the entirety of my point.

We're obviously not going to change each other's minds, so this is probably the point where we should agree to disagree and move on. Last word's yours.

At least SMS is easy to divert that way. Think about the services that verify over Whatsapp or Telegram. Good luck finding someone who cares there.

Phone/Gas/Electricity/Internet/Cable etc bills can be paid through any of the hundred-odd mobile wallet apps. Other than some exceptional cases, none of them require access to the linked phone number.

The UK treats "utility bills" as proof of address. Yes, these are trivially forgeable and often incorrect. Yes, it's a big pain that you don't exist if you're not paying bills.

The US even tries to make its overseas nationals pay tax. As a result, everyone everywhere in the world who wants to get paid by Amazon has to sign a US tax form saying they're not a US taxpayer.

The answer is goodwill and doing the right thing.

Spent the last few months trying to explain to a randomly changing E.ON representative how unacceptable it was for them to send bills with my name on it to a non-existent address.

I moved out of the country in 2018.

They've offered me £10 credit. That I can't use, because I left the country.

I need to gather all the emails together and send them to the ombudsman, but there's around 80 emails now.

I mean, I guess you could do something with the DKIM signature, but good luck getting non-technical people to forward a mail in a way which leaves that intact. Realistically the best you're getting is a butchered screenshot.