Usually, whenever Google does anything, I have little reason to complain. I’ve been using gmail for two years and it’s fairly wonderful. But I’m not going to talk about gmail itself, it’s been around for a while and I don’t really have anything to add in the praise department except for one small convenience that has now effectively been removed that I’m talking about instead.
So, yes, today, I write a proper rant.
One of my favorite things about gmail is in addition to how well it works, it’s a free service. It used to be fairly simple to create a new gmail account for, say, a band or some other sort of side project you’d want an independent email address for (i.e. dinosaur blog), but gmail has added a new step to its account creation process. It asks you for a cell phone number. I don’t recall the specifics of why it needs to do this all of a sudden, something about account verification and just being yet another way to prevent spammers from creating swarms of accounts, by limiting the number that can be made with one cell phone number.
This is stupid.
What’s with the fascination with putting every service available through a cell phone? There are plenty of people who, believe it or not, only use their cell phones as phones, of all things, and don’t care to, or even can’t, run all kinds of account activation crap through their phones. I was perfectly happy directing people to gmail before because of how easy it was to create an account, but now asking for a cell phone number? I don’t care what their terms of use and privacy thingamajigs say, that just seems like an invasive use of technology in a way I’m certain a good number of people won’t care to use it.
As much as I don’t like this, I’m not sure if there’s really anything I can do about it. If anybody finds anything that can be done, let me know. Ironically enough, my google searches for anything haven’t gotten anything useful.
Yeah, this policy sucks, I don’t want Google having my cell phone number!