[thaumasiotes]

How does that address the point? They've got nothing to do with each other. Our example user isn't sharing a phone number with his mom. He's having his phone bill paid by his mom. It is correct to believe that the number uniquely identifies him. Explaining that "all phone numbers uniquely identify a single individual" is false doesn't matter in any way, because it isn't false as applied to the phone number that's giving us trouble. That number uniquely identifies an individual.

This should be a hint that you've misdiagnosed the problem... shouldn't it?

[yellowapple]

> Our example user isn't sharing a phone number with his mom. He's having his phone bill paid by his mom.

Having his phone bill paid by his mom makes it his mom's phone number by default; it's then shared with him, making it a non-unique identifier. That's why it falls into Falsehood #4 (and likely into Falsehood #3, assuming that his mom has a separate phone number that she doesn't share with anyone else).

[snowe2010]

> Having his phone bill paid by his mom makes it his mom's phone number by default;

No, it makes his mom the account owner. Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number. Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO. It’s nonsensical. The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.

[yellowapple]

> No, it makes his mom the account owner.

Which makes the phone numbers under her account hers.

> Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number.

It absolutely does mean that her number is actually your number. That you choose to share it with her doesn't change that; you can revoke that sharing at any time, or even cancel the line entirely.

(And of course, if both of you jointly own the account, then the numbers therein would simultaneously belong to both of you.)

> Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO.

Is the phone bill under the accountant's name and paid from the accountant's personal bank account in this hypothetical? Or is it under her employer's name, and paid from her employer's bank account? The answer to that question determines the owner of the CEO's phone number, and in neither case is the CEO himself personally the owner of that number.

> The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.

And if that assigned person was the son then it would've been the son's name that Google pulled instead of his mother's, and Google's ignorance of its own advice would've gone unnoticed.

[snowe2010]

You don’t know how phone numbers work… and you’re making really bad assumptions through your entire post. Just like shipping addresses are different than billing addresses, account owners are different than account payers are different than account assignees. Google is tying to account payers, not assignees. This is clearly incorrect to everyone else in this comment section.

[yellowapple]

> You don’t know how phone numbers work… and you’re making really bad assumptions through your entire post.

My understanding and assumptions are evidently no worse than yours.

> account owners are different than account payers are different than account assignees

For residential/personal phone plans, they are not. In my T-Mobile account there is exactly one person who can be designated as the owner, payer, and assignee for all of the lines on my account, that person being me. I can at most change the label on a given line, but that label can be literally anything.

> Google is tying to account payers, not assignees.

There is no notion of an "assignee" from any perspective that Google can see. There is only the account payer, which is one and the same with the account owner.

(If the payer is not the owner, then that's called fraud and is a crime in most countries.)

> This is clearly incorrect to everyone else in this comment section.

And it's also clearly incorrect by Google's own guidelines as quoted above. That's the entirety of my point.

We're obviously not going to change each other's minds, so this is probably the point where we should agree to disagree and move on. Last word's yours.