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Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message
- findbizonline 5mo agoWhen did it start?
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 5mo agoRecently helped a small business set up a Google Workspace account and we hit a wall during registration. Told the owners that if Google is already being difficult during signup, imagine being locked out later with client work on the line. Pulled up a few horror stories about Google lockouts to drive the point home. They ended up with another workspace solution.
- super256 5mo agoWith which workspace solution did they end up with?
- p0w3n3d 5mo agoI assume "next leading brand" ;P
- cromka 5mo agoHopefully that means Nextcloud ;)
- thisislife2 5mo agoNo idea, but there's Zoho.com ...
- dakolli 5mo agoCloudflare for email people, its the best and free
- xp84 5mo agoCan you clarify this statement please?
- traderj0e 5mo agoI'm confused too. Cloudflare is a DNS, anti-ddos, CDN, and light cloud
- dakolli 5mo agohttps://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/email-routing/ https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/email...
- petu 5mo agoBut it's only for receiving and you still need external mail server/address?
- dakolli 5mo agohttps://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/get-started/send-emails/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-service/get-started/...
- thebytefairy 5mo agoThis is not really an 'email service' the average person can be expected to use..
- dakolli 5mo agoThen don't use it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Aurornis 5mo ago> and we hit a wall during registration. What does this mean? The scanning a QR code and sending a text message from this article, or something else?
- thrownaway561 5mo agoEveryone hates on Microsoft, but their platform is 50x better than Google. Personally nowadays I would be looking at Proton if I was going to setup a workspace for my company.
- windexh8er 5mo agoThis is hilarious. Microsoft has had many issues and outages with M365 in the last few years. I mean, I guess if you don't rely on mail, then sure.
- b112 5mo agoIf one takes the comment to mean, 50x better for support, I can believe that. After all, 50x almost nothing can be achieved fairly easily.
- nottorp 5mo agoMaybe MS actually has support. The UI is so much worse than Google's (which is bad enough for communication compared to Slack) that you just cannot win though.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo agoWe are 365 shop… I cannot think of one single time the 365 being down has affected us at all. Maybe you’re right I don’t know. Maybe your region is worse than my region.
- windexh8er 5mo agoThen I would gather you don't rely on mail like many of their customers. Just do a simple search of M365 outages and you'll get plenty just in the last year.
- bilalq 5mo agoWhen trying to upgrade from the Business Standard to Business Plus plan, Google will reduce your workspace storage from 2TB/user to 0 bytes for up to 24 hours while it upgrades you. These are actual quotes from support: > Upon checking, I see that the storage is showing as 0 bytes, because of the upgrade that has been done from business standard to business plus. Not to worry as this is very normal. > I understand your concern and how important it is for the storage to be updated due to the business requirements. > > To give you full transparency into what is happening: when a Workspace subscription is upgraded, our backend systems must first detach your previous Business Standard storage allocation before provisioning the new Business Plus limits. During this transition window, the quota temporarily defaults to zero. > Now please turn ON user storage limit nor shared drive storage limit. Once you turn ON, please wait for 5 minutes and then please turn it OFF. ^ That last attempt to try to force storage quotas to reset faster didn't work, btw. Still took hours.
- gedy 5mo agoGoogle Workspaces are just like Windows 11 on the network, and constantly running Windows update. You never know what changes, installed/uninstalled, or breaks.
- remus 5mo agoI feel like I must be using a different gogole workspace. I've used it every day for the last 10 years and just don't seem to have these issues? Stuff just seems to work for the most part? It's all way more stable and low-admin than any other desktop software I've used at least!
- dotancohen 5mo agoAre you a home user or corporate? Do you maintain a deployment for multiple users?
- remus 5mo agoBoth
- bborud 5mo agoThis is why I have I have started planning to transition away from Gmail for all domains I manage. Gmail doesn't actually get any better as a product - just more annoying as they try to upsell me on crap I don't want or need. It gets a bit more shitty every year. The sheer size of Gmail means I have zero chance for support even though I pay for a service. The risk is too great to be acceptable.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoYeah, I can't even register a new Gmail/workspace account at this point. "This phone number has been used too many times."
- traderj0e 5mo agoWhat do they use instead? Grass tends to be greener on the other side. Though it wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft offered better support despite having a worse product.
- dotancohen 5mo agoThis is useful. What were the horror stories? Which workspace solution did the client settle on?
- benoliver999 5mo agoI've been reasonably happy with it since 2013 now. This last year however, I've started to hear complaints from staff of annoying popups about AI stuff people don't want to use
- infoinlet 5mo ago[flagged]
- dvh 5mo agoAny Gmail person can tell me why Gmail is tolerating Gmail phishing emails that use Google's own services (e.g. https://storage.googleapis.com/savelinge/ https://storage.googleapis.com/savelinge/... ? More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414
- dewey 5mo agoThe same reason spam filtering is hard. It's not possible to catch every misuse of the service without too many false positives.
- dvh 5mo agoThe same 5 urls has been used for 3 months
- dewey 5mo agoThat doesn't really change the fact that it's hard. Do you know how many full movies are on YouTube that infringe on copyright? How many pirated streams are hosted on S3? How many piracy sites are behind Cloudflare. It's just very hard to police at scale and if something is flying below the radar it will be there for a while. They probably spread out their assets over many accounts, or even use misconfigured buckets with write permissions to drop some files in there.
- unholiness 5mo agohttps://xkcd.com/277/ https://xkcd.com/277/
- hydrogen7800 5mo ago"It's so easy when you don't know how". I'm not sure if this phrase is in common use at all, or if I just misheard it once and attributed it to mean that when the details of a problem aren't obvious, its easy to conclude the solution is simple. "Why don't they just do ___?"
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- opengrass 5mo agoI got this a few weeks ago, it was a URL like "sms?:number" which tries to pre-fill text in app. Didn't work for me (Fossify) so I had to copy the number and verifier text from that URL and send it manually. It's for saving money spent on providers like Twilio.
- reconnecting 5mo agoGmail has been evil both for client privacy as they use email scanning for marketing purposes, and for 'spam' filters that reject legitimate emails. The fact that they're introducing QR/SMS/MMS/whatever they want is actually an interesting signal, because it will harm the customer experience, which might result in the growth of responsible paid email services.
- riddlemethat 5mo agoThe only “real” competition for Google Workspace is Microsoft if you need a full collaboration solution beyond just email, and 99.999% of customers of such hosted solutions need that full solution. It’s why Dropbox worked even though hacker news users probably roll their own sync solution.
- reconnecting 5mo agoTuta, Fastmail, and Posteo are all much better alternatives to Gmail in terms of privacy. My comment, as per subject, is about Gmail.
- daft_pink 5mo agoHis point was just that many business users can only purchase Google’s solution or Microsoft’s solution, because they’re the only services that will offer interoperability with many other security and compliance services and advanced functionality like SSO, third party email scanning, compliance journaling etc. The email market is essentially a duopoly as soon as you need any functionality beyond basic email.
- windexh8er 5mo agoThe simple fact that you believe this is insane to me. Microsoft?Security and compliance? Ahhh, yes the north star of security! No, you don't need either of these companies if you need a corporate stack for communication and collaboration. And anyone who believes Microsoft or Google is doing anything out of the ordinary to protect their users or data is out of the loop.
- spwa4 5mo agoThe real problem for privacy is that governments are increasingly outsourcing the verification of identity and bot protection to private companies.
- carlosjobim 5mo agoOutsourcing? Governments have never been involved in bot protection or online identity verification for anything else than their own websites. It's like saying that the government has outsourced burger making to McDonalds.
- red_admiral 5mo agoEstonia is the exception here, not sure about the other Baltics. Switzerland is trying. The UK is trying to try.
- spwa4 5mo agoI do mean for their own websites.
- carlosjobim 5mo agoThanks, now I understand your comment.
- aboardRat4 5mo agoLiveJournal allows verification with Russian State ID "gosuslugi".
- aboardRat4 5mo agoAnd what do you expect instead? To get a Russian gosuslugi ID, you also need to bind your phone and ID number. And of course their database is leaked in real time.
- CWwdcdk7h 5mo agoLast time YouTube wanted to verify my phone number it was easier to find a free service to receive SMS than for Google to deliver it to my actual phone. And Google didn't care I "verified" a number assigned to other side of the world.
- mghackerlady 5mo agoIt's becoming increasingly hard to find a service that lets you see verification messages, and even then google doesn't like a lot of the numbers those services use
- medvidek 5mo agoIn my country there are several telco operators that will send you basically an unlimited number of SIM cards for free (as in free beer) that you can use for getting the verification SMS and then immediately throw the SIM away. The only "cost" is that you have to wait a day or two for the SIMs to get to your physical mailbox.
- qingcharles 5mo agoWhat happens when they ask for you to get another code to that same number, though? Can you access that number again?
- hedora 5mo agoCan you delete the phone number after verification + switch to TOPT (with the private key written down next to your password, probably in a password manager) for 2FA? I think that's considered "more secure" in most account security flowcharts.
- qingcharles 5mo agoYeah I try to switch everything to TOTP these days, try to remove the SMS option on whatever I can. Google offers about a dozen ways to verify your account now.
- dsr_ 5mo ago... and gives me a message on my primary phone: "This number has been used too many times."
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Aurornis 5mo ago> Supposedly, using the QR code on the smartphone triggers an SMS sent from your phone to Google in order to verify your phone number. Does anyone have a better source of information than this one forum comment from someone who thinks scanning a QR code is enough to get your phone to send a text message? EDIT: It’s just an SMS URI. It doesn’t automatically send anything, just opens a text message for you to send. This is just the old phone number verification with a QR code convenience method.
- noitpmeder 5mo agoI think it's probably enough to get your phone to open your texting app with a pre populated number and message body, then all the user needs to do is hit send.
- yawnr 5mo agoIt probably opens a prefilled text message and the user still has to hit send. That's the only API I know on iOS anyway.
- philajan 5mo agoCan confirm this is what scanning the QR code does. I just went through this to get my Google dev account verified.
- gruez 5mo agohttps://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5724#section-2 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5724#section-2
- goldenarm 5mo agoRegarding how easy simswap is in 2026, it's dangerously stupid from Google to rely on SMS
- cute_boi 5mo agoI don't know why verizon etc.. don't charge like $0.25 cents per sms. Then these provider would stop sending too many sms.
- jmyeet 5mo agoEverything is going to get so much worse and AI really is to blame. So many websites now have these verification pauses and CAPTCHs because of AI agents. Part of it is agents. Part of it is everyone running their own awful versions of Googlebot. Years ago IIRC there was a "bug" where the Android emulator allowed you to create real Google accounts. This was found and I'm sure millions of these accounts were created. There's a whole black market for Google accounts. Whereas I lost a Google account I'd created for a relative because it hadn't been used in awhile and it was tied to a mobile number I no longer had. I don't see how this ends without registering for a service like Gmail being tied to your government ID.
- hedora 5mo agoI don't understand the anti-agent blocks. What exactly is the problem if an AI agent reads your website and summarizes it for me? If it is bandwidth, why not spend the effort making a screen-reader friendly version of the site, and somehow shunt agents to that (saving 99% of the cost of serving the page)? (I run an ad blocker, so the ads will not be displayed either way, but I see more agent blockers on ad free sites than ad supported ones anyway.)
- jmyeet 5mo agoBecause people do things like this. They spin up OpenClaw and ask it "find me a computer with an RTX 5070Ti or 5080 that's in stock within 50 miles of me that I can go and pick up today". So now the agent is crawling bestbuy.com, walmart.com, etc looking for PCs. I don't run one of these sites but I would bet the traffic looks a lot like a Web crawler and is incredibly resource-wasteful. If you were at the screen you might go and start searching for "5080" or you might go into Computers and start filtering. People just don't care if an automated agent is wasting someone else's resources. Also, where's the ad revenue in an agent crawling your site? It's just going to be an arms race like adblockers and CAPTCHA but it's going to be so much worse for real people who want to do anything.
- DivingForGold 5mo agoWon't be registering any new gmail accounts in the future and will gladly dump the ones I have if Google tries to force obtaining my phone no.
- xchip 5mo agoI also receive too much spam, I'll believe in their AI whenever they are able to fix spam.
- aboardRat4 5mo agospammers also use AI
- arjie 5mo agoI went through it to register just now. No QR code required. Same flow as it has been for years: 1. Personal/Child/Business 2. First/Last 3. Pick email 4. Date of Birth 5. Backup email / Skip 6. Password 7. Enter phone number 8. Confirm with 2FA code 9. Done. I just made the email testregistrationflow@gmail.com and have since forgotten the password. So that’s one burned. But feel free to try testregistrationflow1@gmail.com and see if it works without a QR code. The headline is clearly a misstatement of what is a specific flow for someone to make many Gmail accounts programmatically.
- cute_boi 5mo agoI just checked and it asked me to scan QR code and after opening QR code it will attempt to send some random token.. Google is probably doing A/B testing or they are using some sort of ML algorithm....
- guidedlight 5mo agoThey should probably go back to the original invite only flow they used when Gmail launched. Every account having the ability to invite an only small finite number of new accounts is one way to thwart scammers.
- sixhobbits 5mo agoNot really, even "legit" marketing providers have massive automation rigs to warm email addresses, make them behave naturally and email each other in rings for a bit before using them for cold outreach. So they'd just do this to farm invites if they needed
- lokar 5mo agoIt was not finite, or uniform. I refilled the invites every week or so based on user behavior.
- saltcured 5mo agoNot without some kind of delay function and probably filtering/evaluation of which new accounts get this capability... Everyone here should be familiar with exponential growth of n-ary trees. If you can get one of these accounts and each new invitee gets to invite 2 more, you can already have accounts gone wild.
- mikestew 5mo agoIs this the reCAPTCHA crap I just ran into minutes ago? It’s the Cloudflare “verify your humanity” thing, and the checkbox isn’t good enough, so now there is a “mobile verification, the support page for which (that I briefly skimmed) talks about scanning a QR code. (EDIT: TFA didn’t clear it up for me, but it sounds similar.)
- everdrive 5mo agoThanks for the update. I've been meaning to fully move away from gmail. It's clear that now is the time.
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agoYes I had the same issue and wrote an hackernews comment[0] and was gonna write a blog post but laziness (but I am glad that privacyguides wrote an article!) I also want to share a comment that someone (Velocifyer) added on my comment: "If you make a blog post, make sure to also comment on how the audio reCAPTCHAs are nearly impossible and are blocked on public VPNs. The visual reCAPTCHAS have vauge instructions (they say “Select all squares with busses.” when they mean “Select all squares that have a bus or part of a bus and do not select any other squares.”. For 2 years I could not figure that out so I had to use the audio captchas but then Google blocked them on public VPNs and also made them almost impossible. I could only figure that out when Google Gemini clarified it for me." Also another fact that I had discovered but to upload youtube vidoes more than 15 minutes you have to do this verification with sms and I found that its system of sending sms was quite finnicky and (too much limits is actually just one try) Google and other tech giants's recent changes/lobbying are really impacting the open internet and it feels to me like we as people who have knowledge about these topics must do something to reform things as I simply cannot ask people who are technically unaware about these topics to fight for these changes unless we advocate and educate them about it Most people just have simply way too much of other issues to fight for these things that they have almost taken for granted, but this to me means that the responsibility is on us people who are technically sound to fight against the attacks on open internet if we wish to preserve it. I think my point is that we all might be waiting for other people to protest against these tech giants but I think that the world is looking at us people for such protests, Let's hope that we are able to educate more people and the open internet is preserved. Our small steps might mean a lot in the future and so to not be dis-illusioned to make small steps thinking that they might be too small but we have to fight tech giants if we wish to preserve open internet. Every step is meaningful no matter how small [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48042596
- vachina 5mo agoGoogle is trying to retain the value of their userbase, because many third party services use Gmail auth as a signal for low fraud risk.
- traderj0e 5mo agoYep. In general I'm glad I have so many random accounts now that everyone is getting more protective, it's like a credit score.
- tamimio 5mo agoThis is not new, back I think in Feb when I registered a new one, it did ask to send an SMS instead
- oldherl 5mo agoWechat (Weixin; 微信) from Tencent has been doing this for years. Now Google is becoming the new Tencent and the US is becoming the new China
- warkdarrior 5mo agoDo we get cheap EVs and high-speed rail now?
- Retr0id 5mo agofwiw I was able to set up a fresh google account without SMS via a used android device (with no SIM installed), 2 days ago. But I suppose on balance, having a second device is more onerous than having a second SIM.
- saaaaaam 5mo agoI tried to create a new gmail address recently because my primary gmail address is my name, and it's quite common, so I get more email for other people than I get for me. My phone number - which I've had for about 15 years and have only ever used for personal purposes (minimal SMS, mainly just an iMessage/Whatsapp ID) - is apparently "not eligible" to create a new gmail account. Which is quite strange.
- throwa356262 5mo agoIf this is with a new android phone, return it and let the manufacturer know why you couldn't use the phone.
- aboardRat4 5mo agoIf he had this phone for 15 years, I bet it's not bound to a phone, it's bound to a sim card.
- mikestew 5mo agoPhone number, it’s not tied to any piece of HW because is portable. I’ve had the same phone number equally as long, but I’ve transferred it to multiple devices over the years.
- TimByte 5mo agoFor something as central as a Google account, it feels pretty unreasonable that a long-held personal number can be silently rejected with no appeal path or explanation
- AstroBen 5mo agoRegister your own domain and use that for your email, and you'll no longer be held hostage by Google. Takes almost no effort and will cost you a few dollars a month.
- lenerdenator 5mo ago> and will cost you a few dollars a month Dead on arrival.
- AstroBen 5mo agoIf you don't feel that's worth it you can use Gmail, yeah.
- lenerdenator 5mo agoIt's not just me; most people won't. That's the issue.
- AstroBen 5mo agoWhy is it an issue? I don't care what other people do with their email.
- okanat 5mo agoDemocracy is the style of ruling where majority's ignorance dominates over the vulnerable. You will be eventually forced to use internet and forced to use the way your government wants you to use it.
- AstroBen 5mo agoYeah, fair point. They're certainly trying to push it in that direction but so far there are still alternatives. I've seen age verification get a hell of a lot of pushback so that's encouraging.
- 5mo ago
- rexthonyy 5mo agoHow could they.
- TimByte 5mo agoThis feels like one of those "security" changes that also happens to conveniently eliminate a lot of privacy-preserving workflows
- webdoodle 5mo agoBecause it is. Total surveillance only works if the people are forced to wear the tracking collar. The next steps are tying it to CBDC, that require a phone number to access your wallet, and tying it to realid/passport to restrict travel. 2FA has become the wedge to break privacy into a million shards.
- catlikesshrimp 5mo agoI prefer TOTP, but service providers seem to prefer their own apps or sms.
- eep_social 5mo agoPhone numbers have become the unique identifier used to build profiles of people and the providers can still claim “security” when they change it to pursue that revenue stream.
- userbinator 5mo agoTotal surveillance only works if the people are forced to wear the tracking collar Better to call it a noose. Because you can also be entirely "unpersoned" online if you don't comply.
- jeroenhd 5mo agoThere are services online dedicated to temporary account activation phone numbers to bypass Google's requirements, but most of them can only receive messages. Requiring the user to send an SMS seems like an excellent method to get rid of those services so that bots can no longer use them. I don't really see the point of a privacy-preserving workflow when it comes to a Google account. It's not like they need to know your phone number to track you.
- konstantian 5mo agoI can say that this QR code could be requested if IP is suspicious and/or associated with unusual activity. Recently I did register a new google account from my own residential IP and it did not request any additional confirmations, not even SMS verification.
- Daedren 5mo agoReminds me of Telegram that forces you to pay premium to login to a new device depending on the country. Login, not registration. This is all due to the cost of SMSes of course. You can bypass this if you have a passkey, but phone and password isn't enough. No idea why they opted to do that, it's not like passkeys are indicative of any device binding.
- sumanep 5mo agosms are free, at least rcs
- jeroenhd 5mo agoRCS is not SMS. RCS does have a fallback to SMS in some rare inter-carrier cases, but it won't fall back if you're stuck on 2G or anything. SMS also isn't free. Many contracts contain "free" texting, but that's just SMS being packaged into the subscription price. Carriers charge each other for (excess) SMS exchanges, so SMS simply cannot be entirely free.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoThey do all this and meanwhile, in between startups and a few personal accounts, when I try to register a new Gmail account and do the text message verification (the old/current TOTP style) I get "This phone number has been used too many times." Meanwhile the amount of spam from Gmail I'm getting goes up and up and up.
- Night_Thastus 5mo agoPeople complain a lot about Gmail, but honestly I kind of understand Google's plight here. They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used. But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain - and both a source of and recipient of endless waves of spam and scams. It's an endless pile of data to hold onto, FOREVER, as well. I enjoy hating on Google when appropriate. But when it comes to Gmail, I understand what they're dealing with. It's honestly why I believe the idea of free e-mail is just bad, fundamentally. You can't expect a free e-mail service to be good or have any kind of support. The fact that it still exists is more out of shear fear of the repercussions than any good will on the owner's part. Just get a paid e-mail service. They're better, and offer a lot more peace of mind.
- nzeid 5mo ago> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used. Not even remotely true. They regularly shut down products and services with impunity. If Gmail cost more than the data they directly or indirectly mine and sell from their users, Gmail wouldn't exist either.
- traderj0e 5mo agoThe stuff they've shut down has been nowhere near as important as Gmail.
- lukan 5mo agoYeah, but they still don't run a charity. They sell ads and information - and gmail provides them with lots of valuable information. If that ceases to be true, goodbye (free) gmail.
- duskwuff 5mo agoShutting down GMail would practically amount to shutting down email. It's by far the largest email provider in the US (and probably in the world but I don't have that data). There's no other provider who could take up the slack; if it were to abruptly shut down, a lot of users would simply lose access to email altogether.
- dotcoma 5mo agoTime to leave the sinking ship. Try Tuta, or Proton, or Fastmail, or Zoho.
- superkuh 5mo agoThere is one way to sign up for a gmail account that does not require this: get an old chromebook out of the trash or for $20, then go through the account setup process on ChromeOS. It will create a google/gmail account that does not require use of a smartphone.
- flibble 5mo agoThis could well be to help prevent sms pumping — where someone makes money by receiving smss to a particular set of numbers. Requiring the user to first send an sms breaks the economics that type of fraud.
- shevy-java 5mo agoNow people only need to connect this to age sniffing and the global corporate-driven movement to destroy and abolish VPNs. Politicians are no longer working for the people but their own money - aka by definition these are lobbyists. Note that "scanning a QR code and sending a text message" means, for the most part, a smartphone. One could do so via a tablet too, I suppose, but most who register will do so via their smartphone device. For some reason accessing the www is increasingly tied to "identify now!". This is a huge contrast to the freedom of the 1990s. I don't think we should accept that.
- n64controller 5mo agoHave you got something to hide ?
- hamilyon2 5mo agoThe latest moves from google are the damning smoking gun evidence that anti monopoly court ever needs. "Do this or else". Recaptcha, gmail, google suite, android, chrome, colab and even google play must be viable businesses on their own, separate from google ads machine. Gmail must start competing for users with other email providers. And, yes, recaptcha must pay its infrastructure cost in full only from recaptcha revenue. This is the good way to level playing field, silence all the critics and let air into the room.
- benoau 5mo agoI like how they argued AI was a massive threat to their search empire and subsequently advertising empire ... and then a few weeks after the judge issued their astonishingly light measures to address Google's monopoly abuse, they partnered with Apple and achieved ~100% of default AI agents on smartphones being powered by Google!
- ymolodtsov 5mo agoGoogle is a such a monopoly in email you can just go online a get any other free or paid email service.
- globalcostdata 5mo ago[flagged]
- kstrauser 5mo agoOh, excellent! Having been on the end of someone flooding a service with tens of thousands of autogenerated Gmail accounts. And if you don’t want to share your phone number with Google, which I totally respect, there are a zillion other email providers. Contrary to popular perception, Gmail != email.
- negura 5mo agomost major platforms reject email addresses that are not from major providers. for example creating a deepseek account asks to use a "global provider" and gives GMail as an example. github recently rejected @proton.me. discord does this as well etc
- kstrauser 5mo agoI’ve never, ever, not once, been blocked from registering because I was using a self-hosted domain. I’ve seen plenty of services that block anonymizers, typically with the explanation that they were getting too much spam from there.
- negura 5mo agoyour claim wasn't that Gmail != anonymizers. your claim was that Gmail != email
- eth0up 5mo agoA couple years after a hurricane left me without power for a week two, I fired up a generator, configured my phone as an AP, and went to do some important things in my Gmail account. We need to prove it's really you, they posited. Simple enough I thought. I'll just use the same password I've used since 2001. Oh, I must authenticate with a text, you say? Certainly not a configuration I've made myself, but they're holding the cards on this one, so be it. I enter the confirmation code. We still need to prove it's really you, again. Shucks. I try again. And again. And again. Sorry, but you'll now have to fuck off. Why? Because we've locked your account for complying with our security theater. Fuck. I'm in a disaster zone. I need to get things done! Google cares. But thankfully, so did the FCC, which I registered a complaint with, arguing from the perspective of interference with emergency communications. The FCC actually sent the rascals a letter. The leviathan complied and unlocked my account, and suddenly my password was secure again. Thank you FCC. Although I doubt I'd get the same results with current adm...
- dirkc 5mo agoI recently had to do google takeout on an old google apps account. The account didn't have 2 factor auth and while enabling it I got stuck in a loop scanning the QR and getting a code via text message. I can't remember how I eventually broke out of the loop? I wonder if there is a single engineer at Google who actually understands the whole registration/verification flow and all the edge cases?
- nicce 5mo agoMost people don’t understand how QR code works. So right now it may just send a SMS or prepare for it. But some day, it will do the remote attestation under the hood and the end user does not see the difference. I would bet a lot for this preparation.
- everyone 5mo agoThere are defo still some workarounds to make new google / gmail accounts without giving a phone number or any info.
- zamalek 5mo agoObviously this is bad in general, but what's the threat profile here? Google already has the content of your emails and I guarantee they have pinned down your fingerprint unless you're using Snowden-level counter-int. Protest this by using a paid email provider. My $60 yearly payment just went through today, is that honestly too much for the typical person around here?
- hd4 5mo agothe most nefarious thing about Gmail/Google Accounts is how it's not only the default SSO option, but for many AI services, notably even Chinese-owned ones like Deepseek and Kimi, it's often one of the only ones (the other being Apple ID).
- doctor_radium 5mo agoGmail turned me off way back when it became obvious that they scanned your email to present relevant advertising. I've paid for email nearly forever (Earthlink, not the most high tech provider but good enough) and get nearly zero spam. Their price went up again recently, but apparently if you mention Fastmail they'll match the cost. I was listening to the local TV news a few weeks ago and the reporter talked about an SMS scam insisting that you owe unpaid turnpike charges. He said "most of us have seen them". I'm thinking, I've never received anything like that!" and then realized it could be because I don't give out my phone number to just anybody who asks. And tend to push back when they do.
- ninalanyon 5mo agoI use GMail and Hotmail/Outlook but via Thunderbird or the Android app, I almost never use the Webmail interface. What happens if Google pulls the plug on your account and you have no offline archive?
- thedangler 5mo agoHow do you scan QR codes on the device that is showing the QR code?
- hedora 5mo agoDidn't come up in testing. What sort of user wouldn't have a google-issued corporate laptop and phone?
- TimoKn 5mo ago[dead]
- ymolodtsov 5mo agoIf you haven't created a Gmail or an Instagram account in a while you might be surprised how aggressive it is. For instance, try doing this without verifying your phone. Both can ban you right away because they had to ramp up their anti-spam protections. Pretty much everyone already have an account, so most people creating new ones are just that, spammers.
- tintor 5mo agoOr they are kids / young people, who didn't need email before, and now need it for school / college.
- ymolodtsov 5mo agoYes but they're almost surely in the minority by now.
- v20 5mo agoI found it curious how hard it is to create a Facebook account now, especially after struggling so much to get an old account deleted years ago. These large companies seem to be at the point where they don't want any new users anymore. Or at least they can afford to lock some people out. We should be way more vocal about this so the idea that "everyone has / can make a (google|microsoft|facebook|whatever) account" dies out.
- Fando 5mo agoI recommend people switch to Tuta mail - the most privacy focused, email service. Read about it.
- fortran77 5mo agoWow! My 93 year old mom will not be able to use Gmail.
- drchaim 5mo agoIt was easy to see coming, and it’ll spread further and to more services. In fact, recently they even forced old accounts to log in or they would delete them. It’ll happen with social media accounts and other things too. The account creation date is going to become an even bigger heuristic in their spam models.
- GaryBluto 5mo agoI wonder how long it will be until those without smartphones will be completely forced out of the mainstream internet.
- rixed 5mo agoThe days of my old google account that predates real identity policies are numbered... People already assume that your "google name" is your official name, so much so that I had to patiently explain a delivery man once that the funny nickname he had for some reason in the delivery notice did not match my ID because that was an old google account from a time when it was usual to use any funny handle for your account.
- chatmasta 5mo agoIs this for GMail only or just Google accounts? A while ago I was able to signup for a Google account with an iCloud relay email, and it _seemed_ like I had to give my phone number or use Google Authenticator… but I worked around it by using Chrome Devtools to create a virtual WebAuthN device, after which I was able to scan a QR code for 2FA with 1Password.
- gogasca 5mo ago[dead]
- josefritzishere 5mo agoThis is a hard no for me. Google is out of control.
- khana 5mo ago[dead]
- sneak 5mo agoGoogle has requried a phone number for registration for a long while now, and blocks many types of phone numbers, including almost all easily-created ones, making creating new Gmail accounts rather difficult without a trip to the store to buy a prepaid SIM. (In many countries, including soon the USA[1], you can't get a phone number+sim without showing ID, also.) [1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/the-fcc-wants-your-id-before-you-get-a-phone-number https://reclaimthenet.org/the-fcc-wants-your-id-before-you-g...
- tardedmeme 5mo agoIt's important to note that even if you have to provide ID to get a SIM, Google still doesn't see your ID (yet).
- aetherspawn 5mo agoI get like 33 and a half million spam messages per day to my Shopify store, all bots using Gmail addresses. Google really need to get it together. Their sender reputation bypasses all the normal spam filters, but if it was up to me…
- lucb1e 5mo ago> requires scanning a QR code That's like saying you need to "scan a QR code" to open a train door, not mentioning that the real requirement is linking your phone to your payment data so they can bill you. It's not the ability to turn a data matrix into bytes that Google is verifying here...
- hardwaresofton 5mo agoIt seems we're at a bit of a crossroads. It seems like the world both needs: - Permissionless email (i.e. for agents, empowered users who can program now) - Pervasive email allow listing Wonder if these can both exist at the same time, i.e. having a "public" email that is read first by AI (let's imagine we're in a world where prompt injections weren't so possible) and heavily filtered, along with one that is private and allow-list gated (via some easier-than-gpg-to-use identity marker).
- hilariously 5mo agoSoundcloud now needs a login for you to do anything. Instagram is not showing even previews anymore, the web's velvet glove is tightening.
- privacyfish 5mo ago[flagged]
- rldjbpin 5mo agoto be more precise, it is just replacing the step where instead of entering a 2FA code from your (registered) phone no., it is you who has to send google a text. had this happen several months ago already when trying to log into my google account (at their local hq!). it is a damn shame that they are happy to use special, 5-6 digit numbers, to send this message. it might incur additional charges, and may not even go through if traveling. from this and asking to "verify" my age when the google account itself is 20 years old for antigravity, it has been horrible using their accounts.