this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
406 points (80.2% liked)

Privacy

31886 readers
679 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Gmail prompt to provide phone number sounds like a threat

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I do agree that adding some kind of backup option is probably a good idea. For many people, losing their email account would mean being locked out of basically all their online accounts (or, in case the account gets compromised, it would mean that all other online accounts would now be compromised too). The majority of people do not use password managers or 2FA, and I've made the experience that many people simply cannot be convinced to make online security a priority. While I'm also a FOSS and online privacy advocate and use tons of self hosted services for that reason, having some way to regain access to their Google account is almost certainly worth the extra data point that Google gets access to. Especially since the likelihood of them already knowing about your phone number is basically 100% if you are logged in on an Android device.