[bobdole123456]

It’s a security measure FOR THEIR SECURITY, not for yours.

It’s an anti-spam, and anti-abuse measure. So they’re not giving away free resources that get used to harass their users.

Why would Google need you to give them your phone number to associate that with you? They’re on many of the phones in the world, someone you know has already done that for them, or you used your own phone to do the same.

[fiblye]

If Google hired reasonable smart engineers, they'd know that a 10 year old account with a stable history of regular emails isn't a spam account.

Unfortunately, Google doesn't seem to have the best staff. Or even good staff.

[bobdole123456]

10 year old accounts get hijacked all the time.

[blackbrokkoli]

Yeah, maybe.

But it's Google. I could name at least 12 datapoints to check wether it's still the same user it was for 10 years on top of my head. Starting with "still using the same device" going to probably things like "typing style", given how sophisticated their AI is.

There is really no excuse for Google's ADD and implementing half-assed features and stopping to support them 2 months later...

[bobdole123456]

This isn’t a feature to authenticate the account. This is to identify the person using the account. They’re tying the person using the account to a phone number that person apparently controls, and thus a billing contact.

This usually means Google suspects you of doing something that might be abusive.

In this case: re-activating a dormant account that was in a data dump would be a safe bet.