I wonder if there's any sort of quiet constraint outside of organizational inertia at work here. Telephone numbers were (are?) one of PRISM/XKeyScore's favorite "strong selectors," and Google, like all major players in communications, does things to make its services play well with the current iteration of surveillance tools. I wonder if the current, seemingly boneheaded approach to applying phone company data to account data via phone numbers, including overwriting names, is some new requirement of the surveillance system.