bouv, I simply don’t want my entire life, every web search, every video watched, every road trip planned, every email sent, AND my telephone number all connected in one database by company whose CEO said “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Give them inch and they’ll take a mile. To me, Google has now gone too far. Maybe it hasn’t happened to you yet … but it hadn’t happened to me either, until a couple hours ago.
Al Bundy Thanks for the GMX suggestion. I’ll give it a try. I have also reactivated a Yahoo email address I haven’t used for years. The only thing I really use the account for is for places that demand an email for registration, like this board – just a way to prevent uncontrolled spam.
YouTube did not request. They demanded. Here is the cut & paste message I get when I try to log on to youtube now.
Link your YouTube and Google Accounts
You will no longer be able to sign in to YouTube without a Google Account.
If you do not want to link this YouTube account, you can sign out here.
When I tried to open a new Google account (with the intention of never using it for anything but logging in to Youtube), they demand a telephone number where they will call or text a code that you must use to active the account before you can log in. It is not optional. And further research finds people who have been prevented from opening a new account because ‘there is already an account linked to that phone number’ – so people who change phone numbers are going to have problems in the future … I’m just done with them.
So, the choices they present being to link all my Google owned web activities together OR to be able to separate one (and only one) Google service from the others by giving them my phone number – I find Google us presenting me with a false dilemma. I choose the option they failed to mention – to simply delete Google from my life.