Comment by maxo133
5 days ago
Google is probably the most aggressive anti-privacy big tech company currently operating.
No other big-tech company goes to such great lengths to deanonymize users and make its services difficult to use, especially during account creation.
The requirement to have a mobile device to scan a QR code to verify that you're human. Reverse SMS verification, where you have to send an SMS rather than receive a verification code. You think of signing up using a VPN server in another country? The phone number you use to send the SMS from must also be from that country.
Not being able to watch YouTube videos when using VPN - without signing in to a Google account, all under the guise of "bot protection."
Gemini not working in 3/4 of cases when using VPN.
It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.
I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities.
PS. The first company federal investigators often go for data is often Google
Trying to fight it takes an enormous amount of time and energy. I carry two phones now - since I have my "privacy" enabled phone that basically has nothing on it. Email, messages, weather app and a few privacy enabled browsers. My other phone has all my "faux" google stuff on it. Maps, gmail, banking apps, my authenticator apps, music apps, etc.
Even then, these can all be tied together fairly easy, but just trying to make it harder to keep my data private is such a battle; and friends always ask me why I spend so much time trying to keep myself anonymous when in 2026 its virtually impossible to do so.
I always tell them: “Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.” (To live well is to live concealed.)
If two phones both carry enabled GPS and/or have NFC or bluetooth switched on then it is very easy to match them.
Nothing like that is required, if you see them on same mobile tower or wifi networks often enough you can say with huge certainty they are owned by same individual.
Basically any piece of information that can be correlated is enough once you have enough data points. Hell, you could probably figure out a way to correlate it by temperature sensor readings
Not even that is required, you just need one other person that has both numbers linked to the same contact on their phone.
This all sounds completely sensible. And yet, being caught by the police with two phones would probably be a big stupid red flag for them.
Having two phones is more common than you think, and has a very plausible explanation even if it's not true for the particular individual: One is my work phone, issued by my company, other one is mine
That happens all the time
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In Uganda carrying two phones is completely normal. Many people have one for work and one for personal use, or simply because they can afford a second phone. Police wouldn't think twice about it.
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> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.
I had a Gmail account before they required phone numbers. One day, Google stopped allowing me to log in, demanding my phone number if I wanted to continue. Nothing was wrong with my credentials, or behavior patterns, or IP address, or anything at all. My already-registered recovery email address didn't help. There was no way to appeal.
I'm not willing to have my phone number extorted from me, so I sighed and accepted that I'll never again have use of that account. It remains a constant source of irritation, because it still forwards incoming messages to my home email address, and Google doesn't do a very good job of filtering out all the spam before they forward it my way.
Adding insult to injury, Google still (years later) hasn't made good on their announcement that idle accounts would be deleted. I wish they would. I'm done with Google.
> Google still (years later) hasn't made good on their announcement that idle accounts would be deleted.
They should be after 2 years, I occasionally get emails, linking: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290
Not OP and loving that the upper part of that linked page comes with a warning message:
> Your account, @gmail.com, doesn’t have a recovery phone number. If you’re locked out of your account, a recovery phone number helps you get back in. [Add recovery phone]
You could get a burner number for $5 to use for the SMS verification. You might want to do this before your inbox fills up and you become unable to receive emails, and before they disable SMS verification and require an Android phone verification.
I could, but as I said, I'm done with Google.
> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.
A process I've gone through a few times (though I didn't actually want a Google Account):
1) Get a new (second-hand sometimes) ChromeOS or Android device.
2) (if necessary) do a power-wash or factory-reset.
3) Do the "set up a new device" process.
4) When it asks you for a Google account, click on the "I don't have one. create a new account" button.
In all these cases, the device didn't (or couldn't, in the case of the Chromebook) have a SIMcard in it, so it couldn't link it to a phone number.
One smartphone that I bought for $20, and never (IIRC) had a SIMCard in, I think the only identity-oriented app I have on it is Netflix. I've wondered if Google links the smartphone's google account to the Netflix account (which is actually not me, but a cousin's), and whether Netflix is complicit in this linking.
I imagine that Google is keeping a log of the ip addresses that phone reports when it's connected to wifi. I There's probably some overlay between you and your known associates / locations.
They also log all the locations where anybody's phone encountered an SSID.
It's unclear whether an SSID suffixed with _nomap truly opts out of the collection, or whether it simply opts out of later sharing.
Even if they don't, the law enforcement definitely does (or rather requires your ISP to).
So depending on who you are trying to protect against you are in for varying amounts of fun.
> No other big-tech company goes to such great lengths to deanonymize users and make its services difficult to use, especially during account creation.
meta comes to mind? you can't even interact with their services unless you have an account, and they ban you if you don't reveal yourself transparently. then they ask you for a state-issued ID to appeal bans. seems like some great lengths to me.
Requires ID for "age verification" to ensure pedos aren't talking to children
"Move fast and break things" mentality, so IDs leak
Pedos use your leaked ID. You land on a list. Meta/Google/Discord/Persona/whoever pays you $20 and gets a slap on the wrist
IDs become useless, so Altman promotes WorldCoin and we all get our eyeballs scanned
Rinse, lather, repeat. Surveillance state grows. Terrorists continue to do terrorist stuff. Pedos continue to do pedo stuff. Normal people get random visits from gestapo because they are 110% sure you were involved in a crime despite proof that you were in a different state at the time.
We're really creating a great world...
I agree. Meta is as bad as if not worse than Google.
It is however much easier to navigate life without Meta than without Google. Even if you use different email, etc, if you collaborate with someone on a doc or whatever they are likely to send you a google link.
google is everywhere. Most websites have one or more of google fonts, google apis, googletagmanager/doubleclick, captcha or more.
One up-and-coming entrant is cloudflare, which prevents you from accessing websites unless you have javascript and cookies enabled.
all the other cdn providers do this too, like akamai, fastly, cloudflare, etc.
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> I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities.
Every scammer, fraudster, scammer-in-training, fraudster-in-training, uses a Google account.
The first company federal investigators often go for data is often Google because that's the start of their lead into their investigation. Google needs to provide answers, sometimes by regulation in countries.
> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity
The main reason they do this is to control abusive use of Google accounts. The goal of making it as easy as possible to create an account is in tension with the goal of making it hard to abuse people through Google services.
Gemini doesn't work 10/10 times for me.
Recently its taken over and I can't switch back to Assistant on Android. Now I have timers that run for a bit and then disappear, and whenever I'm driving and use voice to call it brings up the phone number and requires me to press again to dial.
Absolutely frustrating and I don't understand how this can be pushed as the default.
I can only assume its another scenario where they disable all the features because I'm not in the US, but then never tested it.
First time Gemini popped up in gmail I asked it what the best open source alternative to gsuite was and it and disappeard in a puff of smoke, never to be seen again, I don't even know how to ask it back for a second taunting.
I want to believe this, but I know Google's incompetence too well to doubt something like this is intentional :-)
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Google discontinued Assistant in the first week of September, 2026; it was ostensibly 'replaced' by Gemini then. They should have allowed both until the kinks were worked out of Gemini.
Unfortunately voice control of my phone died on that date too.
Thanks Google.
Have you noticed the front page article sharing front page real estate with this one about Big Tech getting in trouble for not doing more to stop scamming and fraudsters?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/14/dating-app-s...
Regulators want Big Tech to stop children from doing various things (such as access certain platforms or content), to stop fraudsters and scammers, to stop foreign intelligence operations or bots from astroturfing social media/manipulating social discourse, and so on.
Failing to so leads to inquiries, new laws or regulations, fines, and so on.
The technical solutions to combat these problems are the exact solutions that also ruin privacy for users, create friction at account creation time, require ever more draconian identity verification methods and so on. It's 1:1.
"I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities."
It's really not any more complicated than that Governments have told them its time to start violating users privacy in order to combat these other problems.
They also attached to a VERY HIGH NUMBER of ip addresses when you launch Chrome. Run an application level firewall and look at Chrome's behavior on startup. So many that I think they are geolocating users, even across VPNs
How do you suppose an increase in connected IPs affect their ability to geolocate users behind a VPN?
Once they've calculated the VPN exit point, with sufficient data they can eliminate that and reveal the ping times 'behind the curtain' back to your actual ISP. That gives a geolocation radius that can be correlated with other data.
> Not being able to watch YouTube videos when using VPN - without signing in to a Google account, all under the guise of "bot protection."
The problem is that, being an advertising company, views are real money for them and their content creators. The level of fraud in this area is huge. I don't like it either but without it people will just viewbot everything.
Meta is worse, but easier to ignore.
Age verification is pretty aggressive... recently tried creating a youtube account (google) and they require gov't id/facecheck/creditcard? once you hit age restricted content.
Interesting - that's actually the hardline for me I refuse to cross. I will just refuse to use a service at that point if it 'requires' me to hand over a government ID.
I get pissed off enough when I have to do stupid anti-money laundering facial scan BS.
> No other big-tech company goes to such great lengths to deanonymize users and make its services difficult to use, especially during account creation
Dunno. Facebook is pretty ruthless and evil here as well.
Maybe, but I am not aware of anybody being forced to make a Facebook account.
Even in Europe, many banks are now blackmailing their clients into making Google accounts, as a condition for continuing to have access to online banking (and even if you had not wanted online banking, that would have been a difficult choice, as many brick-and-mortar bank agencies have been closed).
Why isn't there a European alternative to Gmail? One that is focused on Euro laws like GDPR ?
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Google is better at it, they goon from the closest while Meta just pulls up a seat.
Do you say google over meta because meta has a smaller footprint?
also: you can subscribe to duckduckgo ($99 or $199/year) and that gives you not only VPN access, but DDaaS - Data Deletion as a Service.
:)
(don't know how data deletion works outside of california, but I think california allows you to say "all brokers delete my data")
Is there a chance any of that is linked to the million scammers that sign up for more and more free accounts, sending spam, getting banned, and then repeating it?
It used to be most of our spam came from Google accounts, and some still does, but now that is far and away outpaced by spam coming from Microsoft who does not take those same steps to deanonymize users. Also, “bot traffic” (AI traffic) is definitely a very real problem sites deal with. Also, you know who else uses Gemini from VPNs?
All the things you complain about seem to have real, direct consequences when not done.
I’m with you, I don’t want to be tracked and don’t want log in to every website. Just saying the reasons are pretty compelling when the reality we live in these days is a connected world with advanced technology where your average teenage could potentially hack a power plant and your average scammer can now use far more advanced AI tools to trick people.
This will only get worse, which is the real reason for the quiet US/EU push to unmask users, require IDs, etc. and not because some kids go online to naughty websites with boobs on them.
Needing to verify your Google Voice with a real phone number (even for existing old accounts) is pretty annoying
> I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy
Yes, they stopped "not being evil"
> The requirement to have a mobile device to scan a QR code to verify that you're human.
FWIW I've never seen this.
It's required for setting up a new Youtube account now.
AIUI Facebook is even more aggressive than Google.
> Google is probably the most aggressive anti-privacy big tech company currently operating
isnt that their only business model almost from day 1? Everyone shitting on Meta because of privacy but Google's the worst.
the original business model was, if I'm not mistaken, licensing the search technology.
Then they found that showing ads with the search results made them a lot more money.
They started optimizing for money made from ads, which depends on user data - letting advertisers show ads to targeted customers.
These policies + the despotic trajectory the US is on is very worrisome.
Imagine what such a government could do with access to all your emails, search history, video history, and web history? If you’re labeled “woke” or some variation of enemy of the state they have plenty of ammo to identify you and break you.
Speculative tangent but I don’t think trump will go away if he loses the elections. He’s made allusions to cancel elections if they don’t go his way next and I believe he’s capable of it. Wouldn’t be surprised if the US becomes a dictatorship next.
More data = better ad sales.
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