zlacker

>>wut42+(OP)
> The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos..

Hopefully that clarifies for some folks why these big tech/social media companies insist on having your phone number as a “2FA for security” despite all the sim-swap attacks.. simply for this moment, because you might be using a VPN, and address/name aren’t in your google account, but definitely your phone number is there, it’s even worse if you’re using an android too, as they probably will pull out all your app/browsing history..

>>tamimi+ya
No, it doesn't "clarify" anything like that. If google doesn't have phone numbers of some subset of the accounts requested... they will just specify so in their response to law enforcement since it is completely legal and google is not currently obligated by law to have phone numbers of all users of Youtube. Sundar isn't going to prison because of that or anything.

Saying that some PM at Google decided decade ago something like "hey guys let's build a database of our user's phone numbers to satisfy some theoretical future dragnet surveillance request from law enforcement and tell our users that it is for their own security" is actually quite ridiculous conspiracy theory if you think about it.