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It's not that common. Of all the several hundreds accounts I've had to make over the years (>800) the ones which require a phone number is around five or six I
by Tor3 4y ago
It's not that common. Of all the several hundreds accounts I've had to make over the years (>800) the ones which require a phone number is around five or six I think, although I can only recall three at the moment.
(EditAdd: When that's said - I agree completely that in most cases it shouldn't be necessary to require a phone number. I accept that my bank wants one, Google keeps asking but you don't have to, and the post office needs one (for text messages when goods arrive - the web page comes after the phone, you don't need the latter one - the problem here is that it only accepts a single phone number)
- pxoe 4y agoGoogle will not let you sign up without a phone number. It also won't let you activate 2fa without a phone number. Even if you do manage to sign up without a phone number or remove it from account, there's still a possibility for you to just get randomly locked out of the account (even if you enter the password correctly), and have google asking for a phone number in order to unlock it (even if you never entered one, so apparently any random number works? how is that supposed to help "verify" anything is beyond me), with no other recovery way around it. It's one of the worst in terms of requiring a phone number.
- Tor3 4y agoMy Google accounts were created earlier, so I guess that "feature" has been added later. And yes, it's crazy. At least I'm not forced to add a phone after the fact. My parents didn't have phone numbers registered with their accounts when they were alive, though they did have recovery email addresses. Some kind of recovery is fine. What' not fine is to enforce that you have to own an SMS-capable phone just to have an email address (or whatever).