How exactly does this help keep your identity safe? Because they don't have your phone number tied to your account? How many times have you put your phone number in your emails to people? I looked, and over the last year I've sent my number to people over 150 times. I used to have it in my sig. How many people do that?

It seems like you and others are fearful of Google's actions because you are fearful of the government's actions. Remember, Google freaked out about PRISM, and the result was them encrypting traffic between their data centers to PREVENT the government from spying on your data: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/google...

i'll consider doing that whenever facebook stops showing me sex related ads (condoms, pseudo-dating sites, etc.), bidding/daily discount sites, etc. and no, these ain't retargeting ads. the only decent ads i see are the retargeting ones.

it doesn't matter how many times i "hide this ad > Why did you hide it? > reason x" that it will continue to show me related ads that i have no interest in. "targeted" is one of those over-used buzzwords that i'm still waiting to do what it is supposed to do - i won't hold my breath.

It was a lot more than that.

I certainly get the feeling that Google's halo is slipping.

I you how much the thought pains me.

Though I'll likely end up with a smaller provider somewhere. Gandi.net or Sonic.net both have very strong pro-privacy and freedom reputations.

They think they are Google - you know, the guys that made the Internet searchable. I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing.

Call verification is used by many services to establish ownership of an account, and to provide a fallback mechanism that automates the recovery of an account. Google likes to automate the shit out of things. This is no different.

I hear that you are angry about their policies, but I really don't hear why you are angry other than it's 'intrusive'. Are you afraid they are going to do something horrible with your phone number but not your searches? Do you have similar concern and passion for what the NSA has done? Are they related to each other?

I've been using the internet for well over a decade now. The number of services I've signed up for must be in the hundreds.

I've never had to verify my identity unless a monetary transaction has been carried out, and then it's to my bank rather than the merchant.

Nothing I get from Google+ needs any confirmation of my real identity.

Now we're getting to the nut of the real argument.

Google would like to assign a face, name and phone number to every Google account. And why is that? For various reasons. A face and a name is very valuable for targeted ads. And a phone number associated with every Google account will help Hangouts. Maybe it will enable sending SMS from the web to any phone and also Voice users can cal from the web from their Google account. Thus, Google achieves their aim of disrupting the carriers and making the phone number irrelevant.

That's just the way I see it anyway.

Making money actually came years later. Google used the method of "get a zillion users and we'll figure out money later."

This is not even vaguely true. Google's algorithm was a bit better, their page was cleaner, and they weren't trying to push you into other services or wall you into any weirdness.

If google had pulled the shit they pull now back then, I never would have switched to it. I switched to google because they convinced me that their simple, honest strategy was based on some sort of a company value rather than just a strategy of leaving profit on the table until they could drive all competition out of business and ask for your firstborn. Corporate values? That's what I get for believing in science fiction.

The biggest advantage Google had was their listings were all search results, whereas most competitors had paid listings included in the results, but at the top of course.

But that was, you know, over 15 years ago.

Also, as the web and search evolved, people who ran web sites figured out what they'd need to do to get found more easily by search engines. It's possible that the rise of SEO was more responsible for a better search experience than improved site ranking algorithms.

There isn't an hour that goes by that I don't search for a few keywords ... like ... freebsd openvpn push ... and guess what ? Results 1 and 3 for that query do not contain the word push.

Every day I am running into this and every day I miss altavista.

https://www.google.com/search?q=freebsd+openvpn+push&tbs=li:...

Is there a way to switch this on permanently?

I don't think SEO really started happening until Google outlined the basic idea of PageRank - until there was something to plausibly target. At which point 1999-2000 were the years of hideous link farms. I sure remember those.

I was an avid user of AltaVista back in the day but what killed it, and why I jumped on Google as soon as it was available was back then, it was simply less polluted.

A huge data set mapping the search terms -> clicks is what made all the difference IMO.

Moreover, in the event that it changes, I have a Google verification problem.

So the fact that I don't trust Google not to leak it somehow is by the by, although that is why I also disabled their "web history" tracking service. No, what really annoys me is that they, and every other service that overcollects, are creating future data management debt for me to deal with. Like I don't have enough already.

Not that phone numbers need to change any more anyway. With universal portability, unless you move outside of the country, you can keep your phone # with you.

One of the leading services targeted by account generation farms to launch spam.

They're unlikely to reinvent account verification from scratch for each of their products though.

And facebook also will opportunistically ask for phone verification when its scrubbing system thinks you might be creating a 'fake' account.

Likely they'll try again for #4.

Not sure if that statement is specifically related to your wife having to "provide a phone number", but... Facebook does the same thing.

I suspect that different people see different behavior.

So, there's no way I'm going to give up my phone number in exchange for a log-in on a free web-site.

Just so that you know. No need to worry about giving up what's already given up.

I suppose they can store other people's address books because it's the "legitimate interest of a third party". I'm pretty sure they can't then use that data (my phone number) for any purposes beyond the third party interest - which means they can't use it for advertising, or to link to any user profiles they may have on me. Basically, they can store address book data, but they can't look at it for their own purposes.

That obviously doesn't apply to US persons, who have no data protection right - hence the horror stories of "friend suggestions" that have obviously come through service providers peeking at address books. I wonder how they can practically filter out EU citizens from that - I suppose it's easy to spot an EU phone number.

(Just to head off the inevitable "Google doesn't care about EU law" scoffing... I think you'll find they do. They only get to export Europeans' personal data to the US because they've agreed to uphold the Safe Harbour principles. If they abuse that privilege, they'll have to do a lot of expensive re-engineering.)

Or do you believe when you give your phone number to Google, it's obfuscated, not indexed or searchable, and not permanently associated with you for their current or future use?

Next step - has anyone confirmed your identity yet?

It doesn't matter the technical details of whether the number is easier to search, it's the intent I find disturbing about this.

http://i.imgur.com/YLgZ7t6.jpg

No, it's to point out that once your privacy has been compromised, you might not be able to undo the damage.