Google silently links your phone number across all signed-in accounts

Android Authority reports that Google silently links a user's phone number across all accounts they are signed into.

If several Google accounts are active on the same device at once, the headline suggests that attaching a phone number to one of them also carries over to the rest — without an explicit notice and without separate consent for each account.

Unfortunately, the full text of the article could not be retrieved, so the technical details of how this automatic verification and linking actually work remain outside the scope of this post. It is also unclear under exactly what conditions the mechanism triggers, or how it can be turned off.

The topic itself is telling: a phone number long ago stopped being a mere contact detail and became a durable identifier, handy for matching a single person's scattered profiles. When that matching happens automatically, with no visible action on the user's part, it naturally raises questions about privacy and about the limits of what a platform may do with data entered for just one of its accounts.

The piece drew notable attention: on Hacker News it gathered 262 points and 61 comments.

Source: Hacker News