Android users, listen up: Google is quietly verifying and attaching your phone number across all your signed-in Google accounts, according to reporting from Android Authority. The policy change happened between August and October of 2025, under the "Verify phone numbers automatically" setting, which must now be opted out of rather than opted into.
What does this mean in practice? All Google accounts used on your phone are going to be associated with your phone number, whether you want them to be or not, including accounts you add in the future. Furthermore, because Google periodically attempts to re-verify phone numbers, you could incur carrier charges associated with that verification process.
It might seem like a shady practice, especially because it was set to function by default, but there's also a good rationale for allowing Google to do this, as it improves the sharing functionality across your Google accounts, and makes things like phone recovery much easier, in the event that you lose your phone and want to restore a new phone to the old one's settings. There's also a slew of quality-of-life features, from faster sign-ins to emergency location services, that work better or faster with this feature enabled.
Of course, there's also an incentive for Google as well, since connecting all your Google accounts via phone number helps to optimize their ad performance, allowing them to show you more targeted advertisements across your devices or accounts.
If you do decide you would rather opt out of this functionality on your Android phone, navigate to Settings, select Google then All Services and choose Privacy & Security. Once here, you need to select the "Phone number verification" page and de-select "Verify phone numbers automatically" to disable this feature.