Some of the best features on your phone are the ones that work quietly in the background. However, there’s a fine line between making your life easier and making decisions on your behalf, and Google’s approach to automatically verifying phone numbers on Android raises questions about which side of that line it’s on. We recently asked readers whether the practice affects their faith in Google’s services, and the results are in.
While this Android phone verification has been in place for some time, it came to the fore when spotlighted in a much-upvoted Reddit post last week. Google automatically verifies your phone number and links it to every Google account signed in on your Android device, including secondary and work accounts, without explicitly asking for your permission. It’s that last part that explains why this has gone unnoticed by so many Android users for so long — the setting is enabled by default, and Google says it helps with things like account security, recovery, and communication features. In other words, it’s opt-out, and even if you turn it off, it won’t remove numbers that have already been linked to your accounts. Those need to be removed manually, which is particularly frustrating if you’ve deliberately kept your accounts separate.