Very unexpected behavior, esp for those with several accounts and phone numbers, intending to keep them separate for security or other reasons.

Yay surveillance state pushed by ad tech!

This is an outrageous privacy invasion and if it's not illegal already, it should be.

I think it's creepy and bad, but "silently" is not accurate, at least in my case: Google sent each of my accounts an email telling me about it.

Its taking me awhile (about a month so far) but Im migrating my Google Pixel 5A to Google Pixel 10 Pro and GraphenOS. Its a step but seriously worth it to avoid the Google stink. RFC messaging is the only real breakage Ive seen so far in that folks that have me in a group msg dont work any more (actually that COULD work as a feature and so far everyone Ive talked to that swear they sent a msg are iPhone users so it could be another Google-Apple pissing contest underway.

Is it silent, though? I got notifactions about it on my devices, then emails on each account. Then I went straight to delete the added numbers and disabled this "feature". It did not leave a good taste that I had to do this after the fact, I would have appreciated a notice with a chance to opt out first, because they may have already permanently stored those numbers in some internal history (I just asked Dropbox for my data and they listed every single email I've ever used on that account too). But, to be honest, I am not surprised, and I already consider all devices and numbers that ever come into contact with a Google account being permanently on record on some Google server.

Just the other day I tried to log into the Google account I have connected only to this HN account, and Google asked me to use the account linked to the backup email address on that account to verify my login, then logged me into that account on my phone when I used it to verify my login. After that point I saw my phone number attached to the HN-specific Gmail account, though it may have been attached before.

This isn't the behavior I observe on my phone.

All my SIMs I've used in my phone seem to have been added as verified phone numbers to my primary account, but my secondary accounts don't have any phone numbers still.

It's still somewhat obnoxious since it means random travel sims that could get reused after they expire are "verified" for my account.

Daily Evil by Google.

Anyone still having doubts about this company? To be fair: the US corporations all do that. I remember how Facebook linked off-connection data together. They are all operating in the same manner here, sustaining US spy interests.

I don't think this is new. If you have ever gotten a "fuck off and die" letter from AdSense after like 2010 or so, then you know they will correlate your identity and ban your other accounts too. They don't ban accounts, they ban people.

I've also heard of people getting oopsied trying to farm the GCP demo credits and someone on HN once claimed that a company's gsuite tenant was actioned when they hired somebody on google's naughty list.