Trying to fight it takes an enormous amount of time and energy. I carry two phones now - since I have my "privacy" enabled phone that basically has nothing on it. Email, messages, weather app and a few privacy enabled browsers. My other phone has all my "faux" google stuff on it. Maps, gmail, banking apps, my authenticator apps, music apps, etc.

Even then, these can all be tied together fairly easy, but just trying to make it harder to keep my data private is such a battle; and friends always ask me why I spend so much time trying to keep myself anonymous when in 2026 its virtually impossible to do so.

I always tell them: “Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.” (To live well is to live concealed.)

> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.

I had a Gmail account before they required phone numbers. One day, Google stopped allowing me to log in, demanding my phone number if I wanted to continue. Nothing was wrong with my credentials, or behavior patterns, or IP address, or anything at all. My already-registered recovery email address didn't help. There was no way to appeal.

I'm not willing to have my phone number extorted from me, so I sighed and accepted that I'll never again have use of that account. It remains a constant source of irritation, because it still forwards incoming messages to my home email address, and Google doesn't do a very good job of filtering out all the spam before they forward it my way.

Adding insult to injury, Google still (years later) hasn't made good on their announcement that idle accounts would be deleted. I wish they would. I'm done with Google.

> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.

A process I've gone through a few times (though I didn't actually want a Google Account):

1) Get a new (second-hand sometimes) ChromeOS or Android device.

2) (if necessary) do a power-wash or factory-reset.

3) Do the "set up a new device" process.

4) When it asks you for a Google account, click on the "I don't have one. create a new account" button.

In all these cases, the device didn't (or couldn't, in the case of the Chromebook) have a SIMcard in it, so it couldn't link it to a phone number.

One smartphone that I bought for $20, and never (IIRC) had a SIMCard in, I think the only identity-oriented app I have on it is Netflix. I've wondered if Google links the smartphone's google account to the Netflix account (which is actually not me, but a cousin's), and whether Netflix is complicit in this linking.

> No other big-tech company goes to such great lengths to deanonymize users and make its services difficult to use, especially during account creation.

meta comes to mind? you can't even interact with their services unless you have an account, and they ban you if you don't reveal yourself transparently. then they ask you for a state-issued ID to appeal bans. seems like some great lengths to me.

> I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities.

Every scammer, fraudster, scammer-in-training, fraudster-in-training, uses a Google account.

The first company federal investigators often go for data is often Google because that's the start of their lead into their investigation. Google needs to provide answers, sometimes by regulation in countries.

> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity

The main reason they do this is to control abusive use of Google accounts. The goal of making it as easy as possible to create an account is in tension with the goal of making it hard to abuse people through Google services.

Gemini doesn't work 10/10 times for me.

Recently its taken over and I can't switch back to Assistant on Android. Now I have timers that run for a bit and then disappear, and whenever I'm driving and use voice to call it brings up the phone number and requires me to press again to dial.

Absolutely frustrating and I don't understand how this can be pushed as the default.

I can only assume its another scenario where they disable all the features because I'm not in the US, but then never tested it.

Have you noticed the front page article sharing front page real estate with this one about Big Tech getting in trouble for not doing more to stop scamming and fraudsters?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/14/dating-app-s...

Regulators want Big Tech to stop children from doing various things (such as access certain platforms or content), to stop fraudsters and scammers, to stop foreign intelligence operations or bots from astroturfing social media/manipulating social discourse, and so on.

Failing to so leads to inquiries, new laws or regulations, fines, and so on.

The technical solutions to combat these problems are the exact solutions that also ruin privacy for users, create friction at account creation time, require ever more draconian identity verification methods and so on. It's 1:1.

"I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities."

It's really not any more complicated than that Governments have told them its time to start violating users privacy in order to combat these other problems.

They also attached to a VERY HIGH NUMBER of ip addresses when you launch Chrome. Run an application level firewall and look at Chrome's behavior on startup. So many that I think they are geolocating users, even across VPNs

> Not being able to watch YouTube videos when using VPN - without signing in to a Google account, all under the guise of "bot protection."

The problem is that, being an advertising company, views are real money for them and their content creators. The level of fraud in this area is huge. I don't like it either but without it people will just viewbot everything.

Meta is worse, but easier to ignore.

Age verification is pretty aggressive... recently tried creating a youtube account (google) and they require gov't id/facecheck/creditcard? once you hit age restricted content.

> No other big-tech company goes to such great lengths to deanonymize users and make its services difficult to use, especially during account creation

Dunno. Facebook is pretty ruthless and evil here as well.

Do you say google over meta because meta has a smaller footprint?

also: you can subscribe to duckduckgo ($99 or $199/year) and that gives you not only VPN access, but DDaaS - Data Deletion as a Service.

:)

(don't know how data deletion works outside of california, but I think california allows you to say "all brokers delete my data")

Is there a chance any of that is linked to the million scammers that sign up for more and more free accounts, sending spam, getting banned, and then repeating it?

It used to be most of our spam came from Google accounts, and some still does, but now that is far and away outpaced by spam coming from Microsoft who does not take those same steps to deanonymize users. Also, “bot traffic” (AI traffic) is definitely a very real problem sites deal with. Also, you know who else uses Gemini from VPNs?

All the things you complain about seem to have real, direct consequences when not done.

I’m with you, I don’t want to be tracked and don’t want log in to every website. Just saying the reasons are pretty compelling when the reality we live in these days is a connected world with advanced technology where your average teenage could potentially hack a power plant and your average scammer can now use far more advanced AI tools to trick people.

This will only get worse, which is the real reason for the quiet US/EU push to unmask users, require IDs, etc. and not because some kids go online to naughty websites with boobs on them.

Needing to verify your Google Voice with a real phone number (even for existing old accounts) is pretty annoying

> I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy

Yes, they stopped "not being evil"

> The requirement to have a mobile device to scan a QR code to verify that you're human.

FWIW I've never seen this.

AIUI Facebook is even more aggressive than Google.

> Google is probably the most aggressive anti-privacy big tech company currently operating

isnt that their only business model almost from day 1? Everyone shitting on Meta because of privacy but Google's the worst.

These policies + the despotic trajectory the US is on is very worrisome.

Imagine what such a government could do with access to all your emails, search history, video history, and web history? If you’re labeled “woke” or some variation of enemy of the state they have plenty of ammo to identify you and break you.

Speculative tangent but I don’t think trump will go away if he loses the elections. He’s made allusions to cancel elections if they don’t go his way next and I believe he’s capable of it. Wouldn’t be surprised if the US becomes a dictatorship next.

More data = better ad sales.

> It's the first thing they ask when you sign up.

It can still be worse. Imagine this: you create an account. You can use the service's free tier. You decide to pay, so you enter your name, address, and credit card number. You get charged. Then you download their app to use the service, you trigger their OAuth flow and... it requires you to enter a phone number, not letting you use your subscription for which you already paid for without a phone number. Oh and, bonus points: you can't delete your credit card information from their system. There's no reachable human customer support, and the only way to delete your CC information from their system is to delete your whole account.

Now, which service I'm talking about? OpenAI's ChatGPT Pro, or more specifically, their Codex subscription. You can subscribe to their ChatGPT Pro for $200 no problem, no phone number is necessary, but you can't actually use it in Codex without a phone number as the OAuth flow requires you to enter one. And how do I know this? Well, I'm sure you can guess... :P

I agree with this. They should have to keep some insane bond for every phone number they keep to pay out when there is a data leak.

I enjoy Apple's Hide My Email, and it would be nice to have a similar Hide My Phone Number.

Yeah, phone numbers are essentially KYC. I use a phone number verification site, but I can't recommend them because they stopped accepting Monero recently.

For long term numbers I would use jmp.chat.

"fighting fraud" - never engage with these excuses. It's never been about fraud. It's always been about collecting and selling your data.

A lot of them also block voip numbers. This is obviously just a way to collect cell numbers that are easy to send spam SMS messages to.

> It really bothers me that every dick and jane website has normalized asking for your personal phone number.

The most a website will get from me is a unique email address and a bogus phone number. If it insists on verifying that phone number, it loses my business.

and then they lock it in harder by using it for 2-or-more-factor authentication

apple has dark patterns for this, trying to get your phone number into their system. You have to do something like "other options" then "don't upgrade security" or something.

Just get a second phone number for all these websites

It's super annoying, because it's normally also a path for account recovery. So if you need to change your number, good luck remembering where you have signed up with it.

[dead]

That comment could be referring to either Google or Apple

People who want security don't use multiple google accounts tho.

Report to your state's privacy department (if applicable) and your Attorney General. No guarantees, but once it's in regulator hands, you can let them run with it.

https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/

That's mighty generous of them. Does the mail contain an opt-out link?

They will probably let you use your phone for 2FA and use the website... from your phone though, right ? (sigh)

Um, I think you mean convenience at the cost of privacy, which most people have no problem with, unfortunately.

Think of how nice this will be for all the people who don't care and have given up! So convenient.

I felt a bit betrayed when I discovered that Facebook has a list of the people I have communicated with on Whatsapp, and was sharing this list with their advertisers. Not just the phone numbers, but the Facebook accounts. My Whatsapp is not associated with Facebook in any way except that they have the same phone number, and I do not have Facebook on my phone.

Bonus-rage if the exploitable "recovery" path relies on "Security Questions" you cannot change which are not-really-very-secret and which overlap with the same questions recorded (and leaked) by other companies.

> There's an option to turn it off if you want.

In practice, there isn't really an option to turn it off.