Google Shared My Phone Number!
When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start p...
"Some years ago, I provided my phone number to Google as part of an identity verification process, but didn’t consent to it being shared publicly."
That may have been the case at the time, but Google have a bad habit of updating legal documents and settings from time to time. Even if you didn't consent to it directly, you may have agreed to a contract you didn't read, which resulted in Google doing everything permitted in that contract. Chances are, the contract says that Google can legally screw around as much as they like, and you're powerless to do anything about it.
Those pesky "We have updated our privacy policy" emails. And "by ignoring this message you have signaled consent" (paraphrasing).
People should really start demanding more sensible terms. Currently, people just don’t care, and companies are taking full advantage of the situation.
And such contracts are legally unenforceable, if you've got the resources to sue.
Guy uses phone number for business, shocked when it gets listed for that business. More at 11.
Except he provided it for identify verification, and if I was asked for this my assumption would be they need a mobile number to send a verification text message. If Google wanted a business number in order to publish it online they should state that clearly.
Yeah fuck Google. Delete all Google accounts before it's too late. Plenty of alternatives exist and you can still benefit from their rankings and whatnot, if your business depends on that.
Sort of hard to exist without interacting with Google at all (lots of the material I'm given in courses is hosted on YouTube).
Your best bet is to use separate isolated/siloed accounts for their different services, never let your GCS account be attached to Gmail or one of their consumer facing products for example, lest it get nuked because some automated system went haywire and now you're scrambling to get the account back.
Sort of hard to exist without interacting with Google at all
I explicitely did not claim that.
And as the other guy said, you don't need a G account to watch youtube.
You can use YouTube without an account. And without even using their website, bypassing their ads and their tracking.
Android has Grayjay, Newpipe, Pipepipe, Vanced. Windows has Grayjay, Newpipe, Freetube, yt-dl and others. Linux has Red, Utube, Freetube.. You get the point.
You do still need a login for age-locked videos, but those are a small subset of YouTube.
Wait, you can actually delete a Gmail account?!
I recently discovered that if you ask gpt-4o if there are any anarchist therapists in Florida, it provides my phone number in the text body of the response. I think this is very cool, but my partner disagrees 😅
I understand the story is about google adding a guy's number to a business profile, which seems very odd. But I wonder if anybody here is old enough to remember phone books? I haven't seen one in a while, but in the landline era the phone company used to automatically deliver one to everybody who had a phone. A large physical book with the name, address and phone number of everybody in the local area, except people who paid extra not to be included. You could dial a number for information, give somebody's name, and a helpful operator would tell you their phone number so you could call them. This was totally normal and it didn't bother anybody - how do people feel about that whole concept now?
except people who paid extra to be unlisted
With social media, e-mail, and the rest of it "out there" people have started assuming that "unlisted" is the default for voice phones now. Also, in those "good old days" of the ubiquitous phone books, the listings were mostly land-lines, and mobile phones were unlisted by default. Because of the rates charged for mobile calls in the dying days of the white pages, there were even special laws regarding unsolicited calls to your mobile phone.
It used to be difficult AND expensive to get an unlisted domain name as well, but that has been evolving and now it's a no-cost checkbox option when registering whether you want your contact info to be listed with the domain ownership or not.
Times do change, and while we are generally more exposed than ever, I believe the shifts to more "private by default" configurations of our contact info are a good thing.
Its weird how more people decided to use this information against people in the modern era than people in the past.
Well I mean you had to go the the kitchen and then look around in the cabinet for the yellow pages. Then you would realize you had five of them, and would say "why the hell do we have five phone books?" Then you'd their out the old ones, only to realize they were all outdated. Then you'd ask your family if they knew where the current one is, and it turns out that it's propping up the short end of the old couch in the basement. Then you'd need to go get it, but since somebody dumped old leftovers in the trash (this was before recycling) they're all gross. So you had to go grab a suitably thick replacement, and figure that the table of contents book from the 1982 encyclopedia set you've always had would work. You after your 3rd trip up and down the stairs you've finally got the phone book but can't remember why, but while you have it you decide to order a pizza, then throw the book in the cabinet where they go. Two days later you find the phone number you needed in the first place, written on the back of an envelope.
It was used against people in the past too, probably more underreported then than now.
Yes, I remember these (they also send a map of the city with all the street and public transportation lines)
But the point is that you can be unlisted from these (and as far as I remember it was free). Not sure about the part where you can call an operator that tell you the number you are looking for.
Anyway, the problem is that Google seems to have shared the phone number even if the user declined to do so (and by the user account, the number was not listed for years). This just seems a move from Google that show a total disperect of the user decision.
The phone company definitely did charge extra for unlisted numbers. The number lookup service, which was just called "Information", was accessed by dialing 411 - the origin of "What's the 411?" In the olden days you got a human being, then they automated it with voice recognition. In most places 411 doesn't exist anymore but it was in service until only a few years ago.
It's like having 100,000 yellow pages books. In the days of old you might be able to switch cities if you were trying to evade a stalker. Now you'll have to change your name, face, and accent.
You can still pay for lookup services. I got a 1-month subscription recently to contact the mom of a friend who disappeared. All I had was the guy's last name and the town he said his mom lived in. Cost 7 or 8 bucks but it was worth it. So anyway I imagine a stalker wouldn't need a ton of resources to track a person down using pay services.
It might be an Android phone you’ve called who marked the phone number as a business and added Three Rings to it. Might not be, I’ve just noticed I get queried after being called or calling numbers not in my contacts, whether it’s a business phone number.
This makes sense to me.
Isn't it a function of Google Maps that anybody can submit changes to the business informations of a company listed there?
It's like a wiki where all registered uses can suggest contributions.
I wonder if it’s possible to specifically exclude your business/website/project from google search. Surely that must be something you can legally do.
If it's your personal info, you can ask for it here.
If it's your own website you want delisted, that's here.
Now do the same for bing, ddg, startpage, yandex, yahoo, kagi, brave, ask, ecosia etc etc....
Which is to say, if it's on the internet and publicly accessible, assume it's permanent and going to be indexed at some point.
Sure, reach out to every website and human on the planet, read through each terms and conditions, and hire fewer than 8 billion lawyers to litigate if they don't. Easy peasy.
I think it's dodgy as well I'd been job searching and I guess I accidently linked Google somehow, so now the sites completely ignoring the details I gave it and insists on sending everything to my Gmail instead of Proton which I actually ditched Gmail for.
anyone can make a google company profile. seems like clickbait.
I was really getting into that article, and then it just just suddenly ends. How anticlimactic. I was hoping the article writer was a bit more dedicated towards finding out why Google posted his personal number in the first place...
