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by google-serf 4505 days ago
Ok, I've never opted in to has hangouts. Every example of the tick box i could find in images had a hangouts option. I understand if it is not related but it was worth mentioning.

It was not my phone, it was a friends who had started from a fresh android 4.4 install. There was no google contact sync. Even if the contact sync was in place, it would be unlikely that the other party would have used my 5 year old YouTube avatar and populated it with both my email and phone number and full name. If my contact on his google side was populated from my gmail; as I have emailed the other party before, it shouldn't contain my phone number either - unless google matched it and shared.

Something went wrong. I think my account is an edge case and I was opted into a service (you are dickheads. Opt out is always evil.) and because I had not consumed enough other services my account was not given the option to opt out. Point remains, google matched my recovery number with my profile, which they said they wouldn't. I can't see any other explanation.

1 comments

> Even if the contact sync was in place, it would be unlikely that the other party would have used my 5 year old YouTube avatar and populated it with both my email and phone number and full name.If my contact on his google side was populated from my gmail; as I have emailed the other party before, it shouldn't contain my phone number either - unless google matched it and shared.

I'll repeat my alternate explanation more concretely: the name and the Youtube pic was auto-synced via @GMail, and your friend just manually added your phone number to it. It's now permanently in his Gmail account as part of Google Contacts, independent of anything done on Google's part.

Get your friend to delete his contact of you from the address book ("People") and see if it occurs again.