it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number

I just now tried the Google account creation process on an unactivated mobile device, and entering a phone number can be skipped. Entering a birthdate was mandatory.

Try to use it for a while also. My experience has also been that, after a short time, you will be required to provide your phone number for security reasons.

no it's always optional - they recommend adding one to be able to retrieve a lost/hacked account

It depends on their risk assessment based on all sorts of stuff (perhaps like your IP, browser info, mouse movements etc.). If you're suspicious (VPN, Tor, heuristics etc.), they require the phone confirmation.

Can confirm, I can create a google account on android without phone number but I cannot do so on desktop. When using the android-created account on desktop, it requires (not optional) a phone number.

A phone number on a fully functional google account isn't optional, at least in western Europe (though I doubt another country is better because then people would just VPN to there).

I once did some work for Google that required accounts to do the project (existing accounts weren't a good fit for the project). They couldn't provide us with accounts because it was a huge hassle and another team, so I ended up standing in line for a long time getting my identity verified a half dozen times for various prepaid sim cards with throwaway phone numbers and I think we billed them for it. If there had been another way, they'd simply have told us...

Try it on Tor, a VPN, or some other IP that doesn’t drop your physical location.

I once attempted to create a Google account from a university (which has their own ASN), and Google still asked for a phone number.

  Google still asked for a phone number

Asks for, certainly. Requires was the claim.

Google asks me a dozen times a day to enable Location Services. Yeah, right.

Twitter does not "require" a phone number, but they'll lock your account very quickly for "suspicious activity" if you don't provide one.

I imagine Google to be similar.

Yes, and after that they need additional account information for more security reasons, like your second e-mail.

Oh, that's why mine got locked! I've been wondering about that. I hadn't posted a single tweet, yet got notified that my account was locked for suspicious activity.

Same happened to me about half a year ago. When contacting support to get it unlocked, you need to agree to the Google privacy policy. Twitter is lovely these days.

I'm not sure when the last time you checked was, but I cannot currently create new Google Accounts without providing a phone number. It is required.

I literally did it just before I posted the comment. This was on an unactivated Samsung Galaxy Note 5.

Wouldn't that link the account to the device's hardware ID and by extension, all the other accounts you've made on that device?

No? The web's security model does not expose such identifiers. The best you can do is fingerprinting, which is actively and continuously defended against by browser makers

> which is actively and continuously defended against by browser makers

... except the dominant one (at least for their own web properties), who just happen to be the adversary in this particular discussion.

We used Meet for a little while at work while looking for alternatives to zoom. The prospect of pouring more of our data into Google's coffers didn't sit well (and anyway audio quality was also sub par).

Two fantastic "indie" alternatives for video conferencing at work:

https://whereby.com and https://team.video

We’ve also been impressed with Jitsi.

Same.

And it's improving pretty much weekly lately.

And you can host it yourself very very easily.

I'm a _big_ Jitsi fan.

(They've got an experimental P2P E2E encrypted trial running too, which will be pretty cool when it's rolled out across all browsers and mobile...)

I’ve seen this (requirement for a phone number when signing up) sometimes, even when signing up for a Google account with a non-Gmail address. It’s ridiculous that a company that does so much tracking with reCAPTCHA and many other systems pushes so much for a phone number (which is something most people don’t change).

Why would you give them your actual phone number? Doesn't everyone have multiple "burner" numbers for spammy services, just like we all have for email?

There are dozens of data brokers that aggregate bulk data from hundreds or thousands of different businesses, for millions of customers: hotels, online shops, credit card companies, loyalty programs, travel, supermarkets, movie theaters, all of it. In the US, probably 80-90% of the large organizations you've given your phone number to have sold your activity to a data broker.

These data brokers then provide all sorts of lookup APIs, using name+zip, or phone number, or email, et c. It's basically "user activity as a service", so that businesses that have acquired your email or phone number can know things like what ZIP you're in, how much you travel, what sort of things you spend money on, your income bracket, what kind of car you drive, et c. It allows them to better tailor their marketing communications to you (e.g. if you only fly first and stay in 5 star hotels, they probably shouldn't try to rent you a Camry on the hotel checkout page).

There are many of these companies, and API lookups are cheap and easy. Google itself has also been buying up purchase histories from many companies (including email addresses) so that they can link your email to your buying habits (as well as your shipping/delivery addresses).

Almost all of this is totally unregulated in the USA, and is for sale to anyone who wants to use it.

In some countries you just can just call the phone company and ask. In Denmark you can just call 118, give the phone number and get the address back or use one of the numerous websites that taps into to the same data. Here is the result of a query using a random Danish phone number https://www.krak.dk/97405354/personer