[TheDong]

> That's clearly malice. Like, there's no good reason that Google would require you to hand over a phone number.

Let me give you a reasonable non-malicious reason:

Googler A: "We have this new attack. People are creating accounts from compromised IPs, and then creating app passwords to send huge amounts of gmail spam through SMTP directly, thus avoiding our browser-based spam mechanisms"

Googler B: "Can we ban them?"

A: "We can't ban them because we have no info on them, just sign-up IP, and the botnet has practically unlimited IPs"

B: "What about forcing them to have a phone number so we can do anti-spam on that, and perma-ban compromised phone numbers from making new accounts?"

A: "Good idea, that'll stop such a huge quantity of phishing emails and spam. That'll be good for the internet as a whole"

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See, a non-malicious explanation.