Yeah fuck Google. Delete all Google accounts before it's too late. Plenty of alternatives exist and you can still benefit from their rankings and whatnot, if your business depends on that.

"Some years ago, I provided my phone number to Google as part of an identity verification process, but didn’t consent to it being shared publicly."

That may have been the case at the time, but Google have a bad habit of updating legal documents and settings from time to time. Even if you didn't consent to it directly, you may have agreed to a contract you didn't read, which resulted in Google doing everything permitted in that contract. Chances are, the contract says that Google can legally screw around as much as they like, and you're powerless to do anything about it.

It might be an Android phone you’ve called who marked the phone number as a business and added Three Rings to it. Might not be, I’ve just noticed I get queried after being called or calling numbers not in my contacts, whether it’s a business phone number.

This makes sense to me.

Sort of hard to exist without interacting with Google at all (lots of the material I'm given in courses is hosted on YouTube).

Your best bet is to use separate isolated/siloed accounts for their different services, never let your GCS account be attached to Gmail or one of their consumer facing products for example, lest it get nuked because some automated system went haywire and now you're scrambling to get the account back.

I recently discovered that if you ask gpt-4o if there are any anarchist therapists in Florida, it provides my phone number in the text body of the response. I think this is very cool, but my partner disagrees

Wait, you can actually delete a Gmail account?!

You can use YouTube without an account. And without even using their website, bypassing their ads and their tracking.

Android has Grayjay, Newpipe, Pipepipe, Vanced.
Windows has Grayjay, Newpipe, Freetube, yt-dl and others.
Linux has Red, Utube, Freetube.. You get the point.

You do still need a login for age-locked videos, but those are a small subset of YouTube.

For now. Google is clearly experimenting with baking ads into the delivered video streams, YT Premium members get served different endpoints already in preparation.

Guy uses phone number for business, shocked when it gets listed for that business. More at 11.

that's a problem too, but the discussion was about interacting with google. fuck them for showing ads down our throats, but at least they don't know who watches the video (when using a proxy like invidious), and so they can't build a profile of you, and they can't bombard you with tailored manipulative ads either, just something possibly totally irrelevant.

Sort of hard to exist without interacting with Google at all

I explicitely did not claim that.

And as the other guy said, you don't need a G account to watch youtube.

Google is clearly experimenting with baking ads into the delivered video streams, YT Premium members get served different endpoints already in preparation.

Enshittification is guaranteed even for the paid tier.

Maybe there'll be silver, gold and platinum memberships next. How long til you realize you've been had?

Those pesky "We have updated our privacy policy" emails. And "by ignoring this message you have signaled consent" (paraphrasing).

People should really start demanding more sensible terms. Currently, people just don’t care, and companies are taking full advantage of the situation.

I wonder if it’s possible to specifically exclude your business/website/project from google search. Surely that must be something you can legally do.

Except he provided it for identify verification, and if I was asked for this my assumption would be they need a mobile number to send a verification text message. If Google wanted a business number in order to publish it online they should state that clearly.

I understand the story is about google adding a guy's number to a business profile, which seems very odd. But I wonder if anybody here is old enough to remember phone books? I haven't seen one in a while, but in the landline era the phone company used to automatically deliver one to everybody who had a phone. A large physical book with the name, address and phone number of everybody in the local area, except people who paid extra to be unlisted. If you didn't want to look somebody up in the book you could dial a number and a helpful operator would tell you their phone number so you could call them. This was totally normal and didn't bother anybody - how do people feel about that whole concept now?

The author suggests it was added through people answering the "is this a business" prompts on their phones, not the identity verification.

Its weird how more people decided to use this information against people in the modern era than people in the past.