Wait wait wait, so your issue was that she'd have to accept a call? As in, have to talk to someone? As in, perform one of the most basic human interactions that is part of what makes us human? And that offends your senses to the point that you consider it intrusive? How antisocial are you? Who do you think YOU are that you can't have a simple chat with another human being. Are you the king of England? Le Roi? Is Google the proverbial peasant under your patronage and must request an audience with you after many prose describing your illustrious magnanimity ordained by God? Get over yourself.
I don't give my phone number to anybody who doesn't need it. Lots of places ask/demand it, but it's always actually optional. There's no law that says you have to have a phone, after all.
So, there's no way I'm going to give up my phone number in exchange for a log-in on a free web-site.
If I knew your phone number, then I already gave it to Google and linked it to your real name, email, employer and other contact info - just so that my contact books sync between my devices, and your picture shows up next to your name on my phone. Ah, if you hadn't put up your picture, my phone uploaded the picture I had, and linked to your name.
Just so that you know. No need to worry about giving up what's already given up.
That's an interesting point. It's illegal for Google to store my personal data without my consent (I am a EU citizen).
I suppose they can store other people's address books because it's the "legitimate interest of a third party". I'm pretty sure they can't then use that data (my phone number) for any purposes beyond the third party interest - which means they can't use it for advertising, or to link to any user profiles they may have on me. Basically, they can store address book data, but they can't look at it for their own purposes.
That obviously doesn't apply to US persons, who have no data protection right - hence the horror stories of "friend suggestions" that have obviously come through service providers peeking at address books. I wonder how they can practically filter out EU citizens from that - I suppose it's easy to spot an EU phone number.
(Just to head off the inevitable "Google doesn't care about EU law" scoffing... I think you'll find they do. They only get to export Europeans' personal data to the US because they've agreed to uphold the Safe Harbour principles. If they abuse that privilege, they'll have to do a lot of expensive re-engineering.)
Or do you believe when you give your phone number to Google, it's obfuscated, not indexed or searchable, and not permanently associated with you for their current or future use?
Next step - has anyone confirmed your identity yet?
I was unpleasantly surprised to see your post deliberately undoing the GP's attempt to obfuscate his number. Is your goal to bully GP into supporting privacy?
It doesn't matter the technical details of whether the number is easier to search, it's the intent I find disturbing about this.
What supposed intent do you find disturbing? Google wants to associate a credit card number with your login, and getting your phone number is a good way to do it. Someone created a throwaway account on a website, and wrote a post asking for phone numbers. Someone made the mistake of giving hers.
